


Tough Luck

by tvfanatic97



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: BAMF Michelle Jones, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Smut, F/M, Grief/Mourning, MJ is Black Cat, Moral Ambiguity, POV Peter Parker, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:54:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26072977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvfanatic97/pseuds/tvfanatic97
Summary: Following the loss of a loved one, Peter withdraws from friends and family and finds himself directionless and dejected, living a repetitive cycle day in and day out of going between work and patrol. That is until he meets the mysterious burglar in black who quickly captures the attention of the city and him alike, simultaneously breaking him out of the monotony of his life and helping him feel alive once again but getting him entangled in a plot that threatens all of New York.
Relationships: Michelle Jones/Peter Parker
Comments: 163
Kudos: 207





	1. Never Let the Black Cat Cross your Path

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Machiavelien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Machiavelien/gifts).



> Machi, all your ~~peer pressure~~ encouragement going back as far as last year has worked lol. My original plan was to write this and post it on your birthday but because of who I am as a person it's coming so late so um, happy belated birthday? Thank you for all you do for the fandom, including all the incredible black cat!mj art you've done which has been a great source of inspiration.

Peter lands on the fire escape with a heavy, weary thud, pausing for a moment to take a deep breath and psych himself up so he doesn’t just turn around and go back out there and continue to avoid coming back to this dreaded place the way he desperately wants to. He then slides the window open and slips inside as quickly and as stealthily as he can.

He is so exhausted he forgets to be careful of the untouched, unopened year-old cans of paint that sit on the floor by the bedroom window and he ends up not only tripping over them but he also accidentally kicks one which rolls across the floor into a darkened corner of the room. There are three cans of some butter-y yellow colour, the vibrant hue originally intended to liven the cramped space of their bedroom.

A memory of the brief conversation that had led up to the decision to paint their bedroom runs through his mind unbidden, words said in between giggles echoing in his mind.

_"Okay hear me out, I know we’re physical science nerds in this house and we’re supposed to hate the social sciences but color theory says that yellow evokes warmth and comfort. You want our bedroom to be warm and comfortable right, Petey?"_

_Funny_ , he thinks as he briefly looks around the dark room streaked with reds and blues from the billboard outside whose light spills in through the open blinds, warm and comfortable are the last adjectives he’d use to describe the space of the bedroom and the apartment as a whole. Lifeless and derelict, maybe.

When Peter first got his powers – fourteen, nerdy and sickly – he’d found the enhanced senses overwhelming, the kaleidoscope of worldly stimuli attacking him all at once to the point where he had to lock himself in his darkened closet in some futile attempt to make it all go away. He’s become more adept at focusing his enhanced sensory perception to enable him to tune things out, he does it on reflex without even having to think about it like the way his mind automatically tunes out the bustle of the city outside and his world winnows down to the suffocating silence of the empty apartment. Part of him almost wishes he could go back to those early days of sensory overload; it was less painful than the silence that greets him day in and day out in the apartment.

He doesn’t bother to fetch the stray paint can, figuring it’s a problem for later, as he makes his way out into the apartment living area. As he walks he takes the time to take note of the injuries he has tallied up tonight: one of his molars is coming slightly loose from a particularly hard punch he took from some guy with a beefed up metal arm, his ring finger feels like it may be dislocated out of its socket from him belatedly blocking a punch from said guy with the metal arm, and though he hasn’t looked at his face in the mirror he can tell he likely has a black eye starting to blossom, red blood cells spilling out of his vessels and collecting beneath the surface of the skin around his left eye.

He pauses when he gets to the equally cramped kitchen to quickly, effortlessly, pop his dislocated finger back into place. At least that’s one injury dealt with, he’s not confident about how much the other ones will have healed by tomorrow morning when he has to go into work.

He then crouches down to open the fridge door and look at what his options for dinner are tonight. He doesn’t find much in the way of sustenance inside, the only things in it being some milk that he’s pretty sure went out of date two days ago that he forgot to replace because basic groceries were never _his_ job, two lone beers and a pizza box with leftover slices from the night before last.

He takes the milk bottle to the sink, uncaps it and takes a quick sniff which confirms that it is indeed out of date so he then pours what remains down the drain. As he does so he notices the pitiful bay laurel plant that sits on the window sill by the sink, its leaves long-dead, but he can’t bring himself to give up on it yet so when the milk bottle is empty of milk he half fills it with some water and pours it into the plant pot in some hopes of bringing it back to life.

After tossing the now-empty milk bottle into the small box reserved for recycling, he heads back to the fridge and takes out the pizza box and he goes and places it on the coffee table that had been a house-warming gift, before he collapses onto the couch, immediately turning the TV on then removing his mask for the first time since he arrived back at the apartment.

Too famished to wait, he doesn’t bother to heat up the pizza and just grabs a slice and immediately starts at it with one hand whilst the other operates the remote to find something suitable to put on as background noise for his TV dinner. It’s a sad dinner in the darkened apartment where the only source of light is the soft glow of the TV he watches on a low volume, plus the old pizza is all chewy, the cheese rubbery and tasteless, but his body welcomes the fuel all the same.

He surfs through different TV channels, going from the news channel which is doing some special on gentrification, to a re-run of some old cop show, to a romance film he immediately switches away from when he sees a young Mandy Moore’s face, and a telesales channel before he eventually winds up back on the news channel, giving up on his search.

Distracted by the process of picking off the mushrooms he hates but still hasn’t gotten out of the habit of getting on his pizza, Peter doesn’t notice when the news switches from the gentrification piece to a news special on a new burglar who has hit multiple places in New York in a short time.

The anchor reporting the story starts interviewing some police officer who offers some insight about who they believe to be responsible but Peter only vaguely registers their words, his modified radio that allows him to listen to police reports alerting him to a potential robbery in progress. As soon as he hears the alert, he finishes off the last slice of pizza before grabbing his mask to ready himself to go out again.

After switching the TV off, he pads to the bedroom and climbs out of the window which he closes behind him before shooting off a web to the building next door to his to swing off the fire escape.

The familiarity of the process of swinging between sky scrapers – the _thwip_ of shooting out his web, gripping it onto some building surface then swinging his body across until the very last moment when he needs to shoot out another web to catch his body – coupled with the cool night wind whipping past his masked face, all helps him feel re-energised and lighter, the injuries from earlier that night feeling like a distant memory already. Being out here provides him a sense of comfort in direct contrast to the bleakness of the darkened apartment he’s all too happy to be taken away from even at such a late hour on a Sunday night, nearly Monday morning.

In no time at all Peter arrives at the jewellery store from the police alert to find law enforcement already present at the area and the suspect seemingly already gone, and Peter offhandedly wonders just how fast the thief must have been in and out.

He takes a few brief moments to canvas the store and apart from a perfectly circular opening through the roof, like someone had carefully cut the hole through it with some sort of device, there’s no other signs of a break in or that anyone was even in the building just a few minutes ago.

But Peter isn’t really concerned about what jewellery may have been stolen. The owner and his family may suffer financially for this year but Peter is far more concerned about human losses than financial losses, so he whistles down at the trio of uniformed officers who are stood gathered at the front of the store as they wait for forensics to work to grab their attention. “Hey fellas, do you guys know if the owner Mr Sandler or any his employees were here during the break in? Was anyone hurt?”

Two of the officers carry on their conversation like he isn’t even there, their disdain for his vigilante alter-ego apparent which Peter is all too used to, but one of the officers fortunately takes pity on him. “Mr Sandler was bought out by some jewellery chain months ago, man. He hasn’t owned this joint in a minute.”

Peter’s shocked to hear this, it’s been a while since he’d been down this way, but Mr Sandler’s was a neighborhood constant. The shop is a few blocks away from the apartment they lived in when he was in middle school through to when he was a high school freshman before him and May had to downsize and get away from the neighborhood and its painful memories.

He’s brought out of his reminiscing when he hears the cops below him talking amongst themselves, their words reminding him of the news anchor’s words that he’d only half heard earlier before he was swinging out of the apartment.

“I bet you ten bucks this was that sexy lady burglar again,” one of them declares. “She’s been popping up everywhere recently. Plus look at how clean the place is. I’m telling you; it was her man.”

“And she made sure there was no one here at the time too,” another one, the one who’d given Peter the time of day, agrees.

“At least she saved us from having to take witness statements,” the other jokes, getting a few laughs out of his colleagues. Peter’s not sure what’s so funny about them not having to do actual police work but carries on listening in on them, hoping to find out some useful information about whoever this burglar that has captured the attention of all of New York apparently is.

“You see that CCTV shot they have of her from the robbery on 3rd that’s up on the noticeboard at the precinct?” The third officer pipes up. “That little skin tight black suit she wears?” he says, wolf whistling in sleazy appreciation.

That sets off a round of lewd comments about the mysterious burglar from the group, and Peter decides he’s not gonna get anything useful out of these guys and it’s time for him to leave when one of them makes some comment about how they’d want her to keep her suit on during.

He swings away from the jewellery store, unsure of where he is heading exactly but he knows that he’s not ready to go back to his shitty apartment just yet, so he decides to just do the rounds around the city in search of anything to occupy him and while up the time so he can avoid going to the apartment for as long as possible, sleep deprivation he’ll likely have tomorrow at work be damned.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t find much excitement; he breaks up a fight between some drunk assholes in suits, deters some catcalling creeps, gives directions to a group of college students, and helps some nearly black-out drunk people find their way home.

Eventually he gives up and decides he can no longer keep avoiding his apartment and should probably head back. He’s disappointed at the prospect of going back, but reasons that given the hour he’ll be able to get a good five and half hours of sleep tonight in an effort to cheer himself up, but a voice at the back of his head tells him that sleep will be hard to come by in the familiar but unfamiliar bed, as it always is.

* * *

As he is very slowly making his way back to the lonely apartment via the long route, he notices a fairly run down warehouse which has a group of black SUVs with blacked out windows parked out front. Nearly fourteen years of donning the suit tells him this is a glaring red flag for possible criminal activity, which coupled with the fairly secluded location of the warehouse and the fact that it’s an _abandoned warehouse_ , has him taking a detour to go and investigate.

He finds a broken window fairly high up, allowing him to look into whatever is going on inside the warehouse and listen in using his suit’s enhanced recon mode.

There’s a group of about thirteen men, or at least that’s how many are visible from his current vantage point, dressed in smart suits who talk loudly and carelessly about how they need to get their loot together for Romita Senior. The name immediately piques Peter’s interest as he put the man in jail during his junior year of college and he was supposed to be inside for another five years minimum, but he supposes money and power can help you evade justice.

Peter deploys droney to stealthily take pictures of each of the men present in the warehouse so he can run their faces through facial recognition later, and he tries and fails not to get giddy at the prospect of having things to do to distract him when he gets back to the apartment. He also has droney take pictures of the number plates of each of the SUVs parked out front, figuring he might be able to track the men’s movements and hopefully have them lead him to Romita Sr.

As he's getting his pictures and continues to listen in he’s startled by the sound of someone loudly landing in the middle of the table the men are sitting around, interrupting their little gathering.

All Peter sees is a flash of black before he’s sneaking into the warehouse, figuring things are about to get more interesting.

Stood in the middle of the table is who he can only assume is the burglar the cops were talking about earlier, the one who was reported as being responsible for the recent string of burglaries across the city on the news.

She stands upright, confident, on the table dressed in an all-black suit with a black utility belt going across her waist and black goggles over her eyes. Her striking white hair is in direct contrast to all the black she wears from head to toe, and Peter hangs on to the roof for a prolonged moment, stupefied, and not hearing a word she says to the men who all look up at her with keen interest.

He’s shaken out of his reverie when suddenly the woman is no longer talking to the men but is now working her way through them with her fists, one of the men at the head of the table already knocked out cold with his head resting on the table at an angle that makes Peter shiver slightly.

Again he hangs there mesmerised, just watching her subdue the second man, then the third, the fourth, fifth and sixth in one impressive swoop before moving onto the seventh. She moves with an ease and grace that almost makes Peter envious, her movements calculated and controlled in a way that can only be a result of lengthy training and mastering of her fighting style as opposed to the ‘learning on the job’ style Peter has employed for the length of his vigilante tenure thus far.

The training and control she harnesses isn’t the only area her and Peter differ, she uses a level of force Peter is not entirely comfortable with, clearly not holding herself back in anyway the way Peter always ensures he does when fighting the unenhanced. Through his enhanced hearing he’s able to hear the morbid crunch of bones and he knows he should swing down and stop her, but still he clings onto the roof watching her and unable to move.

It isn’t until twelve bodies lie around her, all presumably – _hopefully_ – unconscious and there’s just one man left who she sets her sights on, that Peter starts to get a hold of himself.

He launches himself off the roof he was spider-sticking onto with his hands and feet, landing on the ground with a soft thud as the woman in black breaks the guy’s fingers, demanding to know Romita’s new base of operations.

Peter doesn’t know what to say to make his presence known, feeling like his awkward high school self who didn’t know how to act around pretty girls again. He ends up settling on, “Uh, excuse me, ma’am?” and he clears his throat to draw further attention to himself.

The woman freezes in her actions, clearly shocked to see him here, but she quickly recovers and lands a brutal right cross at the guy who sits in the chair in front of her that immediately knocks him out before turning to walk back around the table like Peter isn’t there at all.

Peter startles but follows her, nonetheless. “What are you doing?” He asks dumbly.

She turns on her heels and her goggles are completely blacked out meaning he can’t look her in the eyes, but based on the way her brows move and her mouth pinches he figures she stares at him with impatience. There’s a beat of silence where she doesn’t respond, then, “I’m just gonna grab this bag and be on my way.” She says it in overly sweet and slightly patronising tone, teasing and mocking at the same time as she points to the large duffle bag on the table that through the little gap where the bag is not fully zipped up he can see contains money. A _lot_ of money.

“I, uh, I can’t let you do that,” he stumbles out.

She tilts her head to the side slowly, challenging. “Good thing I wasn’t asking,” she retorts.

She goes to grab the handle of the bag but Peter shoots his own hand out to grab her forearm to stop her lifting the bag off the table. She abruptly looks down at where he’s grabbing her hand and feeling self-conscious, Peter loosens his grip on her.

“Look—” Peter goes to say before being interrupted by a fist nearly colliding with his face; he hadn’t even realised she’d raised her other arm to try and hit him.

There’s a very brief moment where neither moves, the crackle and tension of the air before a fight breaks out that Peter is all too familiar with lingering in the air between them but neither giving into the inevitable just yet. It doesn’t last long though, the woman raising a knee up to kick the elbow of the arm holding onto her forearm with a force that causes him to wince and let her go.

That turns out to be a mistake because before he can even recover from the unexpected kick, the woman turns her body rapidly and starts throwing punches and kicks in a deadly combination that would have knocked out a less super-powered man in a second flat.

He gets to see the grace and control he noted from before when he was watching her from afar from up close this time, his attention torn between admiration of her apparent skills and blocking her hits.

Peter may have superpowers, enhanced reflexes, agility and super strength that usually make fights easy for him but this woman makes him work for it, moving with an elegance and agility that makes Peter wonder if she’s enhanced or just that good.

He mostly dodges her hits but barely, as the pair move around the warehouse with him throwing careless punches and kicks whilst she attacks him with careful and well-targeted hits. It feels like some sort of tango, a dance between partners equal in every way as they attack and defend, moving around the space of the warehouse as they do so.

Peter doesn’t miss the way his heart rate spikes, pumping faster and harder to get blood and oxygen to his straining muscles, nor the way he feels his skin heat up or his chest heave as he grows breathless from exertion. Nor does he miss the way there’s a swoop in his stomach similar to when he’s out there swinging through the city, but it’s different somehow—he feels both energised and rejuvenated. More alive than he has in a while.

He thinks he could carry on fighting her forever, would really, _really,_ like to but she ends up cornering him so he’s trapped in a corner of the warehouse not too far from the table, making Peter see that he hadn’t even realised they’d circled back to near the table during their fight, too distracted by the dance of their fight.

Peter goes to retaliate to get himself out of the compromising position she has him in but she tuts warningly then points to two nearby columns which have two devices with flashing red lights carefully duct-taped to them which he assumes to be explosive devices. He’s almost impressed by how well planned this entire thing was, the explosives clearly contingencies in her plan.

“I wouldn’t do anything rash if I were you,” she says, drawing his attention away from the explosives to her where he sees that she now holds a small button—the detonator. “One move and I’ll blow you to kingdom come,” and there’s a teasing tone to her voice that almost makes Peter think her threat isn’t genuine, but then he thinks of the way she hadn’t held back with any of the goons who lie over the table and floor near them nor with him and he knows, deep in his heart, that she means it.

Walking backwards away from him without stumbling even once even as she gracefully steps over the bodies of some goons so she can keep her eyes on him, she makes her way back to the table where she grabs the duffle bag and slings it over her shoulders.

She takes a few steps back towards him but stops a few paces away from him before she grabs her automatic grappling hook off her utility belt then without even looking, aims it up to latch onto some part of the roof. Peter’s eyes track up the rope to see that the end of the grappling hook has gone out through a perfectly circular hole in the roof reminiscent of the one on Mr Sandler’s roof.

“Well as fun as this was, I’ve gotta dash,” she says, making a kissing motion with her lips before giving him a victorious smirk. She presses some button on the controls of the grappling hook in her hand and the rope shortens as she slowly starts to ascend up towards the roof, eyes still focused on him. “See you around, bug boy,” is the last thing she says to him as she comes close to the circular opening. This time there is a very apparent teasing lilt to her voice that feels familiar, tugs at memories in the recesses of his mind, but he doesn’t have time to examine that familiarity or to linger on why this woman would be familiar to him because at the very last second he sees her press the button of the detonator before he can react.

The last thing he sees before the weak structure of the warehouse collapses on him is the woman in black on the roof of the warehouse, about to launch herself off. Then all he sees is black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Usually I try to make my fics like rom-coms where one of the protagonists happens to be Spider-Man. 'the fugitives' was me veering away from that a lil bit, this one veers even further away from that in tone and plot...we'll see how it works out lol. Speaking of 'the fugitives', I need to finish it so I unfortunately won't update this fic til that's done but after that I'll try to update this once a week. Hope you've enjoyed this first chap and as always, comments and kudos are much appreciated!!
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://tvfanatic97-2.tumblr.com) and on [twitter](https://twitter.com/dayaspsychic) should you want x


	2. Nine Lives Has the Black Cat

It’s unsurprising how much Peter fixates on the burglar in black days following their encounter. The memories of the way she moved and fought, graceful but deadly, along with the familiarity of her teasing linger like the remnants of his bruises from the number she did on him, that and having a building collapse on him – not for the first, or even the second time in his life – do.

He’d be lying if he said he didn’t immediately look up any and all news stories about her as soon as he got home on that fateful night, that he didn’t always stay on the lookout for her during his patrols ever since, or that he didn’t go as far as to ask some of the thieves he happened to come across (or apprehend, whatever) whilst suited up if they knew anything about her.

He can’t help but fixate on her and what she’s up to and how Romita fits into whatever it is she is up to. It doesn’t help that she’s been laying low since their encounter; there’s been no sign of her when he’s looked for her on his patrols, not that he’d even know where to look, and there’s been no news reports about her since she burgled Mr Sandler’s place.

When he hits a dead end in his admittedly limited search he finds himself with no other option but to ask Cindy on the crime desk.

Peter approaches Cindy, apprehensive and reserved, and for a while tries to make small talk with her—asking her about her weekend, trying to lament about the horrors of working under J Jonah Jameson, anything to dance around the topic of the woman in black.

Cindy sees through his bullshit. “What are you after, Parker?” She asks him pointedly, eyes narrowed and head tilted to the side as she watches him slightly impatiently.

“Uh, what have you—have you heard anything about that burglar in black?” At Cindy’s lack of recognition and vaguely confused answering facial expression Peter tries to wrack his brain, to remember back to the news report on her he’d half paid attention to, to see if he can recall any other details about her. After a stretch of silence he carries on, “She’s burgled a few jewellers on the West Side, and she stole the Benin Bronzes from the Met too.”

“She didn’t _steal_ the Benin Bronzes. You can’t steal something that was already stolen, and they were stolen from the kingdom of Benin,” Cindy corrects with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

“Right, of course, yeah,” Peter responds sheepishly, scratching the back of his neck in a nervous gesture he hasn’t been able to shed well into adulthood. “Most items in display in Western museums were just stolen from the indigenous people us White people colonised, right?”

That gets a small bemused chuckle out of Cindy before she gets up to wheel Sally’s currently empty chair, with the other woman having gone to the coffee room to flirt with Kitty under the guise of refilling her coffee cup, closer to her own. “Sit,” she instructs gesturing to the chair, “I can tell you more about the burglar in black who, by the way, the news circuit is now calling the _Black Cat_.”

Peter hesitates momentarily before settling into the seat as Cindy starts to tell him how “Black Cat” has only recently popped up with her first hit being only eleven weeks ago. This is surprising to Peter as he figures that surely he’d have heard about her before last week in that case. All that time he spends patrolling and he doesn’t even know the half of what goes on in his city; what’s the point?

Cindy goes on to tell him more about her but Peter hardly listens, too distracted by the way Cindy plays with her hair and finds any excuse to place her hands on him in some way as she talks to him— removing an invisible piece of lint on his shoulder, leaning a hand on his shoulder as she points to something on her desktop screen. Cindy’s interest is clear and apparent, _flattering_ , but the thought of even entertaining the idea of moving on feels too soon, like a betrayal.

Peter thinks of the disastrous date he’d tried to go on with Johnny some time ago that had ended with them having unfulfilling sex that left Peter feeling so sick to his stomach like he’d been unfaithful that he hasn’t bothered since, and suddenly he’s overcome with a desperate need to get out of this conversation.

“I’ve actually been looking at reports from a couple of years ago out of Chicago of a similar cat—”

He interjects before she can finish whatever she was going to say. “Listen I’ve uh, I’ve gotta go but thank you.”

“Oh well, I could always tell you more over cof—”

Peter is out of his seat and speed walking back to his desk, almost breaking out into a full sprint, before she can say anymore. It’s not his proudest moment, running away the way he does.

* * *

Beyond the new fixation on the burglar in black and having to avoid Cindy, his week plays out much the same as all his weeks usually do:

His days on Monday through to Friday start with him jumping out of bed after having slept through his alarm, _again_ , exhausted and far from rested. The sleep debt he’s racking up likely rivals the debt he racked up from his student loans at this point, he thinks.

After showering and getting himself out of his apartment just in the nick of time, hair messy and shirt wrinkled, he rides the subway to work and has a breakfast of a stale bagel in the cramped carriage whilst on his way.

At work he divides his time up between enduring verbal abuse from J Jonah Jameson, taking photographs to go with any upcoming Daily Bugle articles – from the opening of some new hipster café with a novelty whether that be cats or claims that all the coffee is made of monkey poop, to pictures of his alter-ego in action, to key political figures during the times Liz from the politics desk drags him to an event – and politely dodging the attempts both Cindy and Abe, Jameson’s executive assistant, make at him all while trying to not nod off at any given moment given his bone-deep tiredness.

When he’s endured another work day he makes the dreaded journey back to his quiet apartment with its suffocating aura of foreignness and melancholy, only staying there long enough to quickly eat the takeout he’d have picked up on his way home before he’s in his suit and escaping the apartment again.

It’s rinse and repeat, day in and day out, the days melding into one as he lives out the same cycle over and over again with the only sort of reprieve from the monotonous pervasive gloom of his day-to-day life being his Sunday lunch with his aunt May.

Today he meets his aunt at an Ethiopian restaurant of her choosing. She claims she’s never been here before but the staff greet her with that characteristic friendliness and warmth May seems to invite wherever they go, whoever they are with.

They make small talk as they make their way through their starters to share of Ingudai tibs and Vegetable sambusa, with May telling him about the work she’s doing over at F.E.A.S.T and Peter in turn telling her funny, mostly pointless anecdotes from his day-to-day life. He tells her stories from his work at the Daily Bugle and steers clear of any patrol-related stories; though May knows about his alter-ego, his vigilantism still remains a sore subject, even after nearly thirteen, eighteen if he counts the years they were blipped, years of her being in the know.

The pair settle into a silence, not awkward but not entirely comfortable either, after they finish their starters and one of the servers has cleared away their used dishes and replaced them, leaving them to impatiently wait for their mains.

Peter’s focus is drawn to the yellow pattern on the table cloth; it’s a mustard yellow that reminds him of a mustard yellow sundress that still hangs in the wardrobe next to a brown hand-me-down suit he inherited from Ben. He freezes momentarily, a chill running down his spine the way it almost always seems to sometimes when he’s faced with little reminders of the shared life that was snatched from him.

May clearing her throat breaks Peter out of his spiral and when he looks up at her she just smiles gently at him before she picks up a glass of water and takes a few small sips of it. Peter can sense that May is itching to say something, to broach that particular dreaded topic the way she always tries to every time the two of them spend time together.

His suspicions are confirmed when she starts with, “So, I spoke to Ned the other day.”

Doing his best to stifle an exhausted sigh, he responds with a non-committal, “Did you?”

He already knows exactly where this conversation is going, almost being able to map out exactly what May will say and how she’ll get from point A, to point B, to “ _you need to see a therapist_ ”.

“Yeah, did you know he recently finished his PhD and has just landed a new fancy job with some tech firm. He said the firm was called, um…” She pauses as she thinks, clearly trying to remember what Ned had said to her, “M-something. Maria? Marina? Anyway, I thought he’d continue working out of that Octavius guy’s lab,” May carries on undeterred by his seeming disinterest.

A half-hearted “That’s cool,” is all Peter offers in response.

“He’s doing really well for himself,” she says, sounding genuinely proud. May has always been fond of Ned, so was he— _still is_ in fact, which is why things have to be the way they are currently. She sighs, sounding almost wistful, “You know, it’s a shame you never finished your PhD.”

This time he doesn’t stifle his exhausted sigh. “I’m happy doing photography, May.”

Peter’s about to stealthily steer the conversation along the tracks of photography, maybe tell her a story about an assignment he did involving Liz whom she remembers and still adores from his days at Midtown Tech when they dated for like two seconds before she realised she was a Lesbian, to stop May carrying on along the line she’s currently traversing on. But May ploughs on, “Of course, sweetheart.” A pause. “There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a career in the arts, and you know I’ll always support you in everything you do but…are you happy otherwise?”

Peter doesn’t respond.

“Why don’t you ever talk to Ned anymore? Or Betty? Or even Flash?” May asks, concern marring her voice.

“Flash was my High school bully, May,” Peter retorts incredulously, again trying to not so stealthily change the subject.

May doesn’t take the bait. “It’s been months since you spoke to any of your friends. You can’t keep isolating yourself like this, Peter. How much longer are you going to push the people close to you away? It’s been nearly fourteen months since we lost her, she wouldn’t want this for you.”

Peter scoffs before he can stop himself, almost wants to argue with her and tell her that _we_ didn’t lose her, it was him: _he_ lost her, _he_ failed her and now _he_ has to carry the burden of his failure to save her and try and somehow go on in a world without her.

“I know you don’t wanna hear this Peter but I worry about you, I can’t help it. You can’t keep going like this, it’s not sustainable,” she says, reaching a hand across the table to rest on top of one of his own hands which has formed a clenched fist without him even realising, hand tightly gripping the table cloth beneath it.

Peter quickly retracts his hand out of her grip, ignoring the hurt he sees briefly flash across her face at his rejection of her. “May…” He tries to warn.

“You could go and see the therapist we went to see after Ben, or maybe the one Pepper got for you after Tony and everything? Or a whole new one if you like. There really is no shame in seeking help, Peter. We all need some support once in a while.”

And there it is— point A, to point B, to “you need to see a therapist”.

“After we lost Ben I felt like—” May starts to speak but Peter doesn’t give her the chance to continue as he decides he absolutely does not want to have this conversation right at this moment, a conversation that will serve only to remind him of his failures over a decade apart because he never learns. The scrape of the metal legs of his chair against linoleum as he abruptly gets up and out of his seat drown out whatever else she may have said.

He has the decency to at least pretend to look down at his phone with keen interest before he lies to his loving aunt who he knows deep down is only trying to help him. “I’ve just got a crime alert on my phone. Some, uh, some major hostage situation downtown I need to go and deal with.”

“Peter,” May deadpans, voice a mixture of frustrated and concerned all at once.

Her eyes bore into him, begging and pleading him to let her in but Peter breaks her stare and clears his throat a couple of times before he speaks, “I don’t how long this will take so I’ll probably have to take a rain check on lunch today. Same time next week though?” The lie sits heavy on his tongue, stomach twisting in knots because despite being all of 27 years old he still hates lying to the woman who raised him, the woman who is practically his mother. But his desire to escape this conversation is far greater than his guilt over lying to and leaving her like this.

Peter goes around the table and leans down to press a kiss to the top of May’s head, taking a moment to take in the smell of her conditioner which always brings him comfort even now, years after he first went to stay with her and Ben, before he pulls back slightly and reaches into his pocket to fish out his wallet. “I’ll call you. Love you,” he murmurs before he stands upright again, taking out a few bills and placing them on the table to cover their bill.

May sighs, a weary and defeated thing. “Love you too. Please be careful, hon’.”

Peter is grabbing his backpack and is out of the restaurant before his aunt can say anything else.

* * *

Still feeling torn about not only lying to his poor aunt but also about effectively running away from her and her concern, the way he’s been doing for the past year whenever she’d broach the topic of how he wasn’t coping or “allowing himself to grieve” per her words, Peter swings around the city in search of some crime to occupy him. A sadistic parts of him hopes that maybe he’ll come across people that will try to fight him when he intervenes, he longs for a fight.

Unfortunately for Peter, it turns out to be relatively quiet and he bemusedly wonders if all the criminals are at Sunday service or at Sunday lunch with their families but his bemusement is immediately undercut with the reminder of the way he’d interrupted his own family Sunday lunch, leaving the woman who raised him by herself.

He swings across the city, taking the time to help a blind man cross the street in one street, stopping a would-be purse snatcher in another, and offering to take photos of groups of what he assumes are tourists trying to squeeze everyone in with the phone camera in selfie mode—the tourists reject his offer to have him take the photo for them, instead being much more interested in getting the famous Spider-Man in their photos which Peter hesitantly obliges.

The most excitement he sees is stopping a car that nearly rolls into a hotdog cart when the driver gets distracted and doesn’t properly put it in park. No one is hurt and the vendor gives him a couple of hotdogs for his trouble, something his rumbling stomach is thankful for after he technically missed lunch.

He perches on the roof of some pre-War building as he takes a few moments to eat the free hotdogs. The sun is starting to set in the horizon, the city becoming bathed in brilliant reds and rich oranges, and Peter almost allows himself to bask in its beauty.

_“You know what makes the sunset so beautiful?”_

_“The scattering of light waves by molecules in the atmosphere?”_

_“The colour that results from the scattering process being determined by the light’s wavelength and size of the particles.” She finishes off for him as she runs her hand through his hair where his head rests in her lap. She giggles, then, “But that’s not what I meant, nerd.”_

_He turns and presses his cheek against her thigh and nudges his nose against the soft, supple skin; he has to resist the urge to bury himself in the space between her thighs, wanting to be in this exact moment, with her, for the rest of his days. “Tell me.”_

_“Well.” A beat. “You never know what colour it’ll be, after the scattering.”_

_He doesn’t respond, just smiles then presses a quick kiss to her thigh. He thinks he’s going to marry her one day soon._

Peter swallows down the rest of his hotdog and the barely-chewed bun almost becomes lodged around the newly-formed lump in his throat, but he forces it down because he no longer wants to sit here and watch the sunset anymore.

He pulls his mask back down then somersaults off the building. He delays shooting out a web to catch onto the building next door, just lets himself fall, fall, and _fall_. The swoop in his stomach whenever he does this is familiar but it still makes his heart race all the same, even after all these years.

At the last possible second, he shoots a web out to break his fall then flings his body as hard as he can, using the momentum he gains to round the corner of the building. From then on it’s a familiar repetitive process: thwip, catch, swing.

He decides to head back to the apartment. He can do some laundry, head to the bodega to get some food, menial tasks to while up the time before he heads out for another patrol once it’s dark out.

He feels frustrated and unfulfilled from how he’s spent the afternoon but still takes the time to help more people he comes across as he slowly makes his way back regardless.

When he’s a few blocks from his apartment building the hairs at the back of his neck stand to attention and he gets the distinct feeling that he’s being watched somehow. Not wanting to alert whoever has set his senses off, he subtlely goes back on himself so he’s now headed in the opposite direction to his apartment.

As he curves around, he looks from side to side to see if he can spot anyone but he can’t see anyone. Except, he knows there has to be someone there because his senses are now all but screaming at him of impending nearby danger.

He’s just about to perch onto the edge of a nearby rooftop to allow him to take a better look to find whatever has his senses going haywire when, with no warning, he finds himself being forcefully tackled onto the asphalt of the roof.

He lands with a grunt, slightly disoriented. When he’s finally got his bearings he looks up and sees her: _Black Cat_. She sits astride his chest with one of her knees pressed against his throat, she applies very little pressure against his throat but it feels like a threat—no, _a promise_ —that one wrong move from him and she won’t hesitate to press her full weight against him and crush his windpipe.

“Heard you’ve been asking around after me,” she says teasingly in greeting.

Peter tries to look into her eyes but is only met with his masked face reflected in her black-out goggles. It’s slightly unnerving and a distant part of him wonders if people find it unnerving staring into his white mechanical eyes.

His gaze drifts down the exposed bottom half of her face, follows the bridge of her nose down until he lands on her full lips without meaning to. His heart rate hitches up a metronome.

When he hasn’t responded to her she applies the slightest bit of additional pressure to his throat with her knee, grabbing his attention so his gaze snaps away from her mouth.

He clears his throat, tries to catch his breath which he pretends is because she winded him when she tackled him to the ground, then, “Well, last time I saw you, you took a bag full of money that didn’t belong to you and I usually stop thieves.”

“What, are you gonna arrest me?” Peter feels her shift slightly and he has to make a conscious effort to not bring his arm that she doesn’t have pinned to the ground with one of her legs up to rest his hand on her hip.

“I’m not a cop.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” She must sense his confusion because she continues, “You’re a White guy who works with the NYPD.”

He wants to protest that the police department hate him, actually, but he focuses on the more pressing matter instead. “Who says I’m White?”

She leans down and brings her face a mere few inches above his. She doesn’t do anything immediately, causing Peter to hold his breath as he waits to see what her next move will be.

He notices the retracted claws when she brings her hand up towards his face. Using just her index finger, she runs a claw along the angle of his jaw, the pressure of it not enough to slice through the material of his suit but enough for him to distantly feel the sharpness of it.

“Hm,” she hums and she almost seems distracted. “You’re White,” she affirms and before he can stop himself, Peter lets out a chuckle, loud and genuine.

“Why are you looking into Romita’s business operations? I know it’s not his money you’re after,” he takes the chance to ask when he feels her pull back from his throat just a little bit.

The air around them shifts and suddenly she’s leaning away from his face and pressing her knee down against his throat with more pressure than before, but not enough to completely cut off his airway, _yet_.

“Who says I’m not after his money? A girl’s gotta eat, after all.”

“Sandler’s,” Peter responds simply. She tilts her head, her confusion apparent. “The jewellery place you hit last week, I figured out that Romita uses it to launder money. But it wasn’t the money or even the jewels you were after, you were looking for something in the back office but what I can’t seem to figure out, is what you were looking for. Sales records to lead you to someone, maybe?”

He’s only taking a stab in the dark but he seems to have hit his mark because she presses her knee more firmly against his throat, enough to cut off his air supply this time. “Stay out of my business and out of my way. Otherwise, I’m gonna stop playing nice.”

She doesn’t ease off his throat and when Peter starts seeing spots at the peripheries of his vision he thinks she just might see this through. Before he passes out she suddenly pulls back and smoothly jumps off him.

Automatically, Peter follows after her and grabs onto her arm before she can grab her grappling hook and leave him.

Her eyes pan down to where his hand holds her forearm in a vice grip then back up to him, she purses her lips and Peter resists the urge to loosen his grip; he already fell for that once.

“Look, I don’t wanna fight you,” Peter tries to reason with her.

She snorts bemusedly. “Need I remind you how our last fight ended?”

“Who are you looking for? Who do you think Romita can lead you to, huh?” He fires off his questions in rapid succession.

She doesn’t respond and a charged silence unreels between them. Peter’s senses automatically tune out the rest of the city, zeroing in on her and her alone; her heart rate remains steady, a slow _lub-dub_ , and there’s no tension anywhere in her body. He’d almost think she were unaffected were it not for the way she almost breathlessly, silently, gasps with each breath in and out she takes.

He can sense that he’s onto something, but before he can press her further he feels a pricking sensation over his left arm not holding onto hers. He takes a second to look down and sees there’s a small needle that she’s lodged into his arm at some point when he was too distracted by trying to get a read on her.

The one second he looks down at his arm is all she needs before she’s suddenly kicking with enough force that he lets her arm go.

Peter collapses onto the ground, landing carelessly with a loud thud, and it’s then he realises she must have injected him with some sort of tranquilizer because his body feels too heavy for him to carry all of a sudden. In someone unenhanced he guesses it’d probably knock them out cold but his body goes into overdrive trying to metabolize and excrete the toxin that pumps through his veins. In a minute or two it’ll wear off but he suspects the woman knows that too; a minute or two is all she needs to make her escape.

“Stay out of my way, bug boy,” she threatens even though that ever-present, familiar teasing lilt to her voice remains. She shoots her grappling hook into the distance and leaves him lying there where all he can do is watch after her as she swings away.

His body is slowly starting to feel lighter, the drug’s effects wearing off, but he doesn’t bother to get up and go after her. He just lies back against the uncomfortable ground and exhales audibly.

He’ll get up and go soon, but for now he’s just going to lie here and catch his breath. Just for a moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the huge gap in updating lol, I had to wrap up [the fugitives](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20432600/chapters/48474575) then [Nurture](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26880337) took up my attention but I'm back now and I'll try to make updates a bit more regular but no promises lol. Hope you enjoyed this latest chapter, promise things will start to pick up. As always, comments and kudos are much appreciated!!
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://tvfanatic97-2.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/dayaspsychic) x


	3. At Death's Door

As before, the woman – the _Black Cat_ —goes underground and lays low following their encounter. And as before, Peter is left to easily, _pitifully_ , fall back into his usual routine:

His days on Monday through to Friday start with him jumping out of bed after having slept through his alarm, again, exhausted and far from rested. The sleep debt he’s racking up likely rivals the debt he racked up from his student loans at this point, he thinks.

After showering and getting himself out of his apartment just in the nick of time, hair messy and shirt wrinkled, he rides the subway to work and has a breakfast of a stale bagel in the cramped carriage whilst on his way.

At work he divides his time up between enduring verbal abuse from J Jonah Jameson, taking photographs to go with any upcoming Daily Bugle articles – from the opening of some new hipster café with a novelty whether that be cats or claims that all the coffee is made of monkey poop, to pictures of his alter-ego in action, to key political figures during the times Liz from the politics desk drags him to an event – and politely dodging the attempts both Cindy and Abe, Jameson’s executive assistant, make at him all while trying to not nod off at any given moment given his bone-deep tiredness.

When he’s endured another work day he makes the dreaded journey back to his quiet apartment with its suffocating aura of foreignness and melancholy, only staying there long enough to quickly eat the takeout he’d have picked up on his way home before he’s in his suit and escaping the apartment again.

It’s rinse and repeat, day in and day out, the days melding into one as he lives out the same cycle over and over again.

 _Except_.

Except now there’s an unease and restlessness that overcomes him. His vague preoccupation with Black Cat morphs, evolves and grows. It grows to the point where now, on his way back to the apartment from work on one Monday he swings by a small stationery store where he picks up supplies: a corkboard, pins and yards of string.

Following that small but major shopping trip, a large chunk of his patrols become dedicated to watching and waiting. He waits and watches all the jewellery stores Black Cat has hit over the past few weeks to find out what exactly it is she is after.

From watching and waiting he starts to gleam some patterns, and he also starts to populate the corkboard he bought like some fanatic conspiracy theorist.

Red marker dotted onto a map he pocketed from work reveal that there is no geographical pattern to her targets. With hours of recon however, he realises that some places are clearly fronts to launder money for Romita’s criminal endeavours whilst others, are just random places hit with no rhyme or reason; likely to throw anyone off the scent of her being after Romita’s business specifically, he presumes.

Hours spent watching each of these places he’s linked to Romita remind him of how much he hates waiting around and observing from a distance as opposed to being in the thick of it, preferably fighting, with all he sees at these places being employees going in and out plus the occasional delivery being made in innocuous, standard white delivery vans.

Even when doing something as dull as watching a mixture of criminals and minimum wage night-shift workers do boring tasks he feels excited. Maybe because it means he can get some answers about someone who occupies so much of his headspace that he’s here now instead of chasing petty criminals, or maybe because as dull as the hours he spends out on rooftops across the city may be, it’s still better than being back at the apartment and being surrounded by the ubiquitous stench of loss that permeates the small space and items that were hers, and _theirs,_ that serve as totems of the life they could’ve had. Or maybe, it’s both.

Regardless, he decides to carry on watching and tracking the vehicles that come and go from the different jewellery stores including the delivery vans.

Following the vans only leads him to a building that houses a company called _Black Rose Mining_. Peter feels hopeful that he might finally be getting somewhere, but a few quick searches on the web show little more about the company than the fact that it’s a subsidiary of a larger company, _Mariana_ _Inc.,_ along with the mining company only having been set up a year ago. This is curious considering that it now supplies precious stones and gems to a dozen jewellery stores across the city, but beyond that there is little else to be found about either companies online, almost as if someone has meticulously engineered both companies’ digital footprints.

No matter how hard he searches he cannot find a definitive link between Romita and _Black Rose Mining_ or _Mariana Inc._ , and from what Peter remembers from dealing with the man when he was a college student, Romita wasn’t particularly business savvy nor did he make any attempts to disguise exactly what he was or to appear in any way “clean”. 

The only conclusion Peter is able to reach from what little information he has managed to gather from his poor attempts at playing detective thus far is that Romita may now answer to someone else, someone who _is_ concerned about cleaning their dirty money and establishing a legitimate business empire, unlike Romita.

The Romita Peter knows, or _knew_ , would never answer to anyone but then—six years is a long time in the organised crime world; hierarchies shift, people take advantage of power vacuums left by a don going to prison to rise up in the ranks of an organisation, and former dons are relegated to being whipping boys for those opportunists.

Peter figures that one opportunist in particular must have piqued Black Cat’s interest, but he hasn’t been able to figure out why or even who the opportunist is yet. Peter still feels an inexplicable compulsion to get the bottom of it all, part of him admittedly thinking figuring this out will help him figure Black Cat out, so he shifts focus from watching the jewellery places to watching _Black Rose Mining_ instead.

Like with the jewellery stores, he doesn’t find much there. The building is heavily guarded and every square inch of the entire lot has a CCTV camera overlooking it which is suspicious, but can also be attributed to the building likely holding expensive, precious gems that he has watched be transported out to jewellery stores across the city. He doubts it, though.

Outside of staff coming and going to their shifts and the delivery vans he saw at the jewellery stores; Peter doesn’t see much else at the warehouse, much to his disappointment.

It’s the same thing over and over again for five nights in a row. Watching the building reveals nothing out of the ordinary and Peter considers giving up and instead working on letting go of his obsession with Black Cat so he can go back to his life before her, to the routine he’d become so accustomed to as sad and meagre as it might have been.

The more hours he spends watching and waiting, and taking pictures of the faces and places he sees, the more he starts to get restless. He itches for some excitement, for some action.

On his sixth night of recon, something finally happens and he almost cheers at the potential the moment holds for excitement. A luxury car with blacked-out windows that is flanked by two SUVs, pulls up to the building but a delivery van also pulls up at the same time, parking in a way that obscures his view of who comes out of the car.

Peter waits nearly an hour, during which time the delivery van drives away and leaves him with a clear view of the car and the SUVs. And when the occupants of the cars finally exit the building Peter gets a clear, unobstructed view of his old friend Romita Sr walking amongst them; he’s got a little bit more grey in his hair, maybe a few more wrinkles on his face, but other than that he hasn’t changed much, years spent in prison clearly not having had much of an impact on him the way they would’ve for someone poorer and more committed to repaying their debt to society.

He has to suppress the giddiness and overwhelming urge to swing down there and web the man up and throw him right back into the prison cell he was supposed to spent the rest of his miserable days in, instead choosing to tail the three cars which is more boring but the more sensible choice, he tries to reason.

He swings from building to building for the initial part of the journey, then as they head out of the city towards the suburbs he has to hop from truck rooftop to truck rooftop to stay on Romita and his goons’ tail.

The journey realistically isn’t very long but it feels like it goes on for hours to Peter but eventually, they finally stop at a large bungalow once they’re fully out of the city and Peter perches on the rooftop of the house opposite and watches on as the group of men all unload from the cars.

It doesn’t click for Peter until half of the men who came in the SUVs drive away, leaving him to watch Romita remove his suit jacket and unbutton his dress shirt through the open blinds that allow him to look into the front room of the house, clearly making himself comfortable, that he has just stumbled upon Romita’s home.

Black Cat was after his base of operations and Peter did one better by finding the man’s home where he’d be most comfortable, most _vulnerable_. After being bested by her twice now Peter can’t help but to inwardly celebrate that he got to this house before her.

He finally has one up on her.

* * *

From then on, going out to the suburbs and watching Romita’s place for a few hours as part of his nightly patrols soon becomes part of Peter’s night time routine.

He watches and he waits, night after night, hoping that Romita’s boss might turn up here or at the very least he’ll get hints of who this boss is he may well have just made up in his head is. But much to Peter’s chagrin, he has no such luck. Romita spends most of his nights at home, clearly having adopted the delegation-style type of running a criminal enterprise since coming out of prison where he sends his underlings out to do his dirty work for him whilst he stays at home in a bathrobe and slippers, lounging around watching Netflix.

Tonight is the fourth night in a row Peter is watching the house and it’s exactly like the three previous nights; at around 9:30pm Romita goes out to the city to the building which headquarters _Black Rose Mining_ , stays there for an hour at most then comes straight back home. There are no detours on the journey there and back and no visitors at his home either.

Peter’s never been one for coffee; the stimulant effects of the caffeine on top of his pre-existing dialled up, hyper-alert senses sends said senses into overdrive. Each time he’s drunk coffee he’s found that his senses become both attuned and dulled, his body warring with itself to try and fine tune his sympathetic nervous system to stop him having a heart attack or something. It means that he’s wide awake and hyper-aware of his surroundings, more so than usual, but also has brief lapses where he’s almost fugue.

He’s been so exhausted from spending his nights out here in the suburbs, the lack of sleep on top of his pre-existing, constant sleep deprivation catching up to him that tonight he got desperate enough to have a small cup of coffee beforehand. That’s what he blames for the brief stretch of time he loses awareness of his surroundings for long enough that he somehow misses someone new showing up at the house he’s spent the past few nights watching, only becoming aware of their presence when he snaps out of his state of near-stupor the next instant to find his senses ablaze and on high alert in a way that reminds him of each time he’s come into contact with—

He sees a flash of white hair whip past across the street by Romita’s house before he can finish his train of thought, getting confirmation of what he suspected. He doesn’t know how she found out about this place but he also can’t say he’s surprised that he didn’t actually manage to one up her for once the way he’d assumed before. What he does know though, is that her presence here can only mean one thing: trouble.

Within an instant, before he can even begin to try to figure out why she’s here or what she’s up to, he sees the three guards that were standing watch by the front of the property get knocked out in one fell swoop before she’s making her way right through the front door, casual and bold. Her presence within the house is soon followed by the sound of gunfire erupting, forcing Peter to get down off the rooftop he was perched with an easy leap before he jogs across the street to go after her.

He quickly checks the pulses of the men that lie crumpled in a pile by the front door and when he’s confirmed they’re alive, carries on through the now open front door to walk into the house he’s spent the last 72 hours watching from afar.

It’s dark inside the house apart from the faint glow of a TV that plays at a low volume which illuminates the open living area, revealing three more men who now sit unconscious on the couches spread out across the space of the large living room.

Peter carries on through the expansive house and apart from one more man he finds lying unconscious on the ground by the island at the center of the kitchen, he doesn’t find anyone else but he can hear gunfire coming from outside the house so he runs out through the open back door towards its source.

From his vantage point on the back porch stairs he sees Black Cat fight more of Romita’s men across the yard, at the other side of the pool that separates him from them.

He’s almost mesmerised by watching the way her lithe body moves, flipping up into the air over the men to dodge bullets and simultaneously take each man out, the way he always is when he watches her fight but he manages to catch himself this time. In the time it takes him to run around the length of the pool, unable to leap across due to the sheer size of it and unable to swing across due to the lack of swing-friendly buildings nearby, she’s dispatched of all the men that were surrounding her.

There’s a brief moment where their gazes meet once he’s a few feet away from her, and Peter subconsciously holds his breath, the air between them growing thick with a charged tension like you may get when you run into an old lover.

The moment is shattered when she suddenly breaks out into a sprint towards the side gate at the opposite side of the yard that leads out of the property, and Peter starts to run after her, his legs moving at their own accord.

His pursuit of her halts when he hears an explosion coming from the main house before it erupts into flames. He stops in his tracks, gaze flitting between the house with the growing fire and Black Cat who’s making her way across the large garden to make her escape. Everything in him screams at him to go after the woman but then he thinks of the men he’d found scattered throughout the house, unconscious not dead.

It’s a split second decision but the moment seems to stretch on as he’s forced to decide between saving the lives of low life criminals or going after the woman he’s been chasing for weeks. Ultimately his conscience wins out, there are people in immediate danger who require his help and it’s not up to him to play judge, jury and executioner to decide who lives and who dies; his job is to save everyone he can. So, that’s what he does.

Moving as quickly and as efficiently as he can, he pulls a total of eight men including Romita, out of the burning house and out onto the street at the front of the house then when he’s done he calls the fire brigade and police.

Before the authorities arrive, Peter makes his way back to the quiet, lonely apartment, dejected and stinking of smoke.

When he gets to the apartment, he doesn’t bother to turn any lights on nor does he immediately shower to get the dirt and soot off himself. He walks through the darkened apartment to get to the kitchen where he grabs some leftover Thai food which he has no recollection of buying meaning he has no idea how long it’s been in the fridge for. It has likely been in there too long based on the odour that wafts into his nostrils when he takes a quick sniff but he decides to risk it, both too hungry and without any other options to consider against eating the leftovers that have clearly gone bad.

Whilst he waits for the noodles to warm up in the microwave, he hits the spider emblem on his chest and steps out of his suit, allowing the red and blue fabric that’s now covered in soot and smoke and is singed in parts to fall into a careless pile on the kitchen floor.

He stands in front of the microwave in just his boxers as he waits for his food, staring ahead with an unfocused gaze at the glowing numbers that count down on the microwave, and his mind distractedly wanders to Black Cat, the way it always seems to nowadays.

The way she left a bomb to detonate in Romita’s house tells him she didn’t care whether he lived or died, meaning she must have gotten the information she wanted out of him. That or she spent all that time looking for him just to take him out, Peter thinks either option is entirely plausible.

He’s dedicated weeks of his time to trying to get to the bottom of what she’s up to. The corkboard that’s leant against the wall nearby that’s covered with pictures of Romita and his associates he’s been able to identify through facial recognition along with pictures of the jewellery stores, Black Rose Mining and Mariana Inc but with only a few bits of strings to show that he’s only made a few tenuous links between them all being evidence of this. And yet, he’s still no closer to figuring Black Cat or what her endgame is out.

Peter’s gaze pans to the blurry NYPD CCTV picture of her that’s at the top of his corkboard. He focuses his gaze on the vague smudge-shaped, grainy version of her, sighs, then his eyes pan to the window sill by the sink where the bay laurel plant remains very much dead despite his attempts to revive it by drowning it in water.

_He quietly pads across the cool kitchen tiles, barefoot and wraps his arms around her waist from behind before bringing his chin to rest on her shoulder. He feels her momentarily startle before just as quickly relaxing in his arms, unconsciously leaning her body back to press against his front._

_“Smells good,” he sighs out, wrapping his arms more firmly around her to bring her impossibly closer to him._

_“It’ll be done in five minutes.”_

_He hums in acknowledgement but makes no move to let her go, more than content to stay in this exact position even if it might make her present task more difficult. He just watches the way she stirs the pot, mesmerised by a bay leaf he watches get folded into the ingredients._

Peter is shaken back into the present by the beeping of the microwave, his gaze snapping away from the plant that was once alive, now dead and decaying.

He grabs the Tupperware container out of the microwave, burning his fingers on the hot plastic as he does so but is too uncaring to wait so starts heading to the couch to eat in front of the TV.

As he’s about to settle down on the couch he hears the sound of his bedroom window opening and closing followed by the unmistakeable sound of someone kicking one of the paint cans he still hasn’t moved then swearing in pain.

He instantly puts his dinner down on the coffee table and starts to head towards the bedroom, pausing briefly to take his web shooters off at the last second when he remembers he’s sans suit.

He quietly pushes the door open and flicks the switch on which allows him to see the figure hunched by the window, _Black Cat_. She’s staring down at the paint cans she’s just accidentally kicked but more noticeable than that is the way she clutches her side, blood spilling through her fingers.

“What the fuck?” Peter lets out before he can stop himself.

She snaps her gaze away from the paint cans to him then, “I need your help.” A beat. “Spider-Man.”

Peter sputters for a moment because she knows who he is and knows where he lives and his mind starts racing through the implications of that. “Wh—what? No. I’m not—no—”

She interrupts his fumbling by reaching her free hand up to pull her goggles off over her forehead then over the ponytail atop her head. “Peter, pleas _e_.”

And it’s been some time since he’s seen that face but once upon a time he knew it well from having spent an embarrassing amount of time studying it in depth and seeing it in his mind near-constantly. He freezes in place as he tries to make sense of what he’s seeing in front of him.

“ _Michelle?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really truly need to stop making any promises about updates, but for now let's tentatively say I'll try for updates every other Wednesday???? We'll see lol. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this latest chapter!! As always, comments and kudos are much appreciated!!
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://tvfanatic97-2.tumblr.com/) and on [twitter](https://twitter.com/dayaspsychic) x


	4. Goin' Straight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a warning to people who work in IT/tech or are just generally knowledgeable about it: this chapter is filled w so many inaccuracies and made up nonsense, pls just bear w me and suspend your disbelief lmao. Also, idk if I need to give a warning for this but there are mentions of recreational drug use in this chapter.

Peter finds himself overwhelmed by the blinding flashlights coupled with the shouts of the paparazzi who call out a mixture of directions on where to look, invasive questions and back-handed compliments that all blend together into one incoherent cacophony. The barrage of sensory input is unsettling and perturbs him to the point where he starts to take note of his bodily functions, every heartbeat and every breath he takes.

He shifts his gaze away from the line of camera lenses and focuses on the woman stood by his side with his arm encircling her instead. There is still a white haze at the edges of his vision from the flashlights that is slowly dissipating, but he can just about make out her silhouette; from the red curls of her wig that covers her platinum locks, to the green satin that hugs the curves of her body.

Subconsciously, his hand grazes a path along the arc of her hip up to rest in the dip of her waist, and he chooses to focus on the smooth texture of satin beneath his fingers instead of the shouts of paparazzi lined up in front of them.

_“Hey Mary Jane, look over here!”_

_“Mary Jane, where have you been?!”_

_“Will you be reviving your stage career?!”_

_“Who have you brought as your plus one, Mary Jane?!”_

Mary Jane.

The photographers all call her Mary Jane, the same way security guards at the entrance had done when they welcomed them to the gala and the same way the valet who’d taken the keys of her luxury sports car when they first arrived had done.

He knows—or _knew_ —Michelle Jones, “MJ” to her friends. He doesn’t know Mary Jane Watson. He doesn’t know Black Cat.

He has so many questions he’d like to ask; questions about why everyone calls her Mary Jane, questions about why she moonlights as a cat burglar at night going after the criminal underworld of New York, questions about what happened to her… Questions about why she left him.

But he hasn’t had the chance to ask her even half of the questions he so desperately wants to. She’d spent the better part of her time since showing up at his apartment slipping in and out of consciousness from the pain medication she was on for the wound on her side, and at the time Peter was more concerned about looking after her than getting answers.

When she was less sedated and more coherent, she had dodged all his attempts to have a real conversation and let him ask her questions about what had happened in the time since they last saw each other. Instead, she’d managed to convince him to come with her to this charity gala before giving him instructions to meet her in a penthouse on the Upper West Side then just like that, she’d left his apartment, leaving him with bloodied towels and more questions than answers.

Now he finds himself in this surreal situation being photographed by paparazzi at a gala that probably cost more per ticket than his annual salary and dressed in a well-fitting black tuxedo, bow-tie and all, that Michelle got for him.

He’s completely out of his element in the environment he’s in where he’s surrounded by people with more money than they know what to do with, where press clamour to photograph him and MJ.

He’s uncomfortable being in a tuxedo when he’s never even worn one before. He can easily count the number of times he’s worn a suit in his life on one hand: aged fourteen at Ben’s funeral, aged sixteen at Tony’s funeral, aged seventeen at his senior prom where he was in his suit for all of an hour before he had to change out of it and leave when a Spider-Man-related emergency came up, and aged twenty-one at his college graduation.

That number would be up to five had he gone to the funeral held just over a year ago, but he’d been overcome with a bludgeoning guilt that rendered him unable to leave the apartment. The thought of having to face a grieving mother who’d already lost her husband and now had lost her only daughter because of him stopped him attending the funeral, instead choosing to stay in the apartment and listlessly stare at the suit laid out on his bed, once t _heir_ bed.

He’s brought out of his thoughts when Michelle winces as she turns her body sideways to give the photographers a different angle, likely having pulled at her stitches.

Peter goes to discreetly ask her if she’s okay but she speaks before he can so much as open his mouth, muttering out a quiet and dismissive, “ _Don’t_.”

Peter grits his teeth to stop himself arguing with her. He doesn’t want to be here even if it brings them right into the epicentre of Romita’s operation, or at least he doesn’t think she should be out and about like this when she needs more time to heal and recover but she’s always been stubborn, that much hasn’t changed.

She waves to the paparazzi and blows them a few air kisses before leading them into the main hall of the gala with an ease that is incongruent with the memory he has of the person she is, or _was_. So much about her is completely unfamiliar to him.

They walk into the gala with their arms linked with Peter trying his best to relax and not appear as uncomfortable as he feels whilst Michelle easily leads him through the crowd, only pausing momentarily to take two champagne flutes from the tray of a nearby server one of which she hands off to him then keeps the other one for herself.

“Try not to look so much like you don’t want to be here,” she quietly murmurs to him as they make their way towards the bar.

Before Peter can respond with a snide retort, she stops to greet another guest who ropes her into conversation for a couple of minutes. Peter tries to listen to what the woman who stops them says to gain more clues that can help him fill in the blanks about Michelle, but all the woman talks about is a part in an upcoming off-Broadway play she swears would be perfect for Michelle to make her comeback. Clearly, he should’ve paid more attention to New York’s theatre scene so he’d have known about Mary Jane, but it’s hard to pay attention to something when you don’t have the money to afford a theatre ticket.

He’s once again struck by how different this version of her who can easily navigate small talk with the rich elites of New York and is apparently an actress, though not a particularly well-known one outside of the circles of elites who frequent plays from the sound of things, is from the version of her he knew. He cannot reconcile the version of her before him with the version he once knew; the version who’d once shyly kissed him and confessed that she didn’t have much luck getting close to people, the version who suddenly left his life without giving him the chance to say goodbye.

He doesn’t pay much attention to any of the other conversations she has with the handful of guests who stop them on their way towards the bar, but he also doesn’t miss the way all of them call her Mary Jane. So once they reach the bar and are stood leaning against the counter facing out towards the floor where all the guests mill about making small talk he turns to her. “Mary Jane?” He finally asks her just one of the questions he’s been dying to ask.

“Stage name,” she replies simply like that should provide him with clarity about everything.

She doesn’t say any more than that and they sip at their champagne in silence apart from the smooth jazz that plays from the live band at the other end of the expansive hall and the lull of polite murmurs of the distant conversations of guests in the background.

“I bet all these rich assholes feel so good about themselves for coming to this charity event and donating a couple of thousands towards ending child labour in the mines that supply all their jewellery stores,” she huffs out to break the silence they’d settled into. “Their donations are nothing to their net worth, and I bet all of them are wearing blood diamonds but they donated 50k so that makes it all okay apparently,” she continues on, an angry edge marring her tone as she speaks. She then turns away to place her flute on the bar counter.

Peter is about to respond to her words when he’s interrupted by a loud and cheery, “Mary Jane Watson!” from a few yards away that startles nearby attendees the same way it does him.

He sees the way her body tenses slightly before she forces herself to relax then turns back around to look to where the shout of her pseudonym had come from. When she meets the eyes of the man who’s making his way towards them she responds with a smooth, “In the flesh,” before flipping her hair over her shoulder and smirking in a way that strikes Peter as overly flirtatious.

She turns her body ever so slightly, allowing the material of her dress to fall to the side and reveal more of her long legs through the deep slit of her dress in a move that has all nearby eyes, male and female, watching her in near awe-struck. The move certainly gets the attention of the man who’d called her name to begin with, _Joseph_ — Romita’s son from a previous marriage who Michelle had been working for the last few weeks. He was supposedly going to be their way into the out of access areas of _Black Rose Mining_ , including their server rooms.

Joseph comes closer to them, pausing to look Peter up and down as if sizing him up before he turns back to Michelle. “Already replaced me, huh?” He says, slyly nodding towards Peter.

“He’s just some arm candy for the night,” Michelle replies easily before leaning up to press a lingering kiss to Joseph’s cheek. “Relax.”

When she pulls away from him he takes one more look at Peter, eyes travelling from the expanse of Peter’s shoulders down to his feet and Peter can’t resist the urge to stand up straighter and flex his arms so they stretch over the material of his jacket, causing Michelle to snort so quietly that he only hears it through his enhanced hearing.

Peter in turn also sizes Joseph up; the man is tall, towering over Michelle even in her stilettos, and he’s relatively well built. However, the stink of liquor emanating off him along with the slight slur to his speech and wobble to his steps tells Peter he’s already well-past tipsy and lacking the motor co-ordination to prove to be a challenge in a fight, should it come to that.

After one more onceover, Joseph eventually turns back to Michelle. “You looking to, uh, to _party_ tonight?” He asks her, voice lowering in volume to just above a whisper as he leans closer to her and raises his eyebrows questioningly before he subtly taps a finger against his right nostril, to make his meaning more obvious.

Michelle shrugs like she doesn’t mind either way before turning to look at Peter questioningly.

Peter pretends to think about it for a moment, then, “I’m gonna have to pass.”

“Suit yourself,” Michelle says as she leans up to give him a peck on the cheek before untangling her arm from his and following after Joseph.

Michelle had told him what she’d learnt about Joseph from frequenting some of the same nightclubs he did over the past few weeks—mainly about his relation to Romita and how Romita had gotten him a job with _Black Rose Mining_ to get his ex-wife off his back about not being in his son’s life. She’d also told him all about his affinity for the white powder, how it’d give her the prime opportunity to get him alone and then swipe his ID badge.

So her going away from the main gala, through the guarded side door alone with Romita’s son is all part of their plan. But Peter can’t help the sense of dread that settles low in the pit of his stomach.

To distract himself, he spends his time picking off hors d' oeuvres from the servers who walk past him every so often and he drinks the expensive champagne. He slows down on the champagne when he realises he’s now up to his third glass, not wanting to get drunk in case anything should go down. He definitely wouldn’t want a repeat of when he’d once gone out in his suit to handle a situation after having five too many beers at the frat party he was coming from in his sophomore year at ESU.

Ten minutes turn into twenty, twenty into thirty, and Peter starts to grow increasingly antsy and restless. He’s been watching the guarded door they went through like a hawk and there’s been no sign of them, but there’s equally been no sign of guards going through there to signal at any trouble either, though that provides him with little comfort.

He fiddles uneasily with his bow tie, doing his best to resist the urge to undo it after Michelle had spent some time carefully tying it for him earlier and instead moves his hands down to fiddle with his plain cufflinks, also courtesy of Michelle.

He grows increasingly impatient with each minute that ticks by and is just about to throw caution to the wind and march to the guards and demand they let him through when Michelle walks back onto the gala floor, closely followed by Joseph.

Peter doesn’t take his eyes off them as they make their way through the throngs of guests back towards him until they’re stood by the bar with him once again. He looks intently over Joseph who looks more dishevelled than before, and whose pupils are blown wide. “You’ve got a little, uh—” Peter says, reaching a hand up to brush the tip of his own nose.

That gets a raucous laugh out of Joseph. “What are they gonna do, kick me out? I’m on the executive board of this fucking company,” he gloats. He’s about to say more but gets distracted by two young women who walk past the trio, brushing past Joseph who turns to watch after them. He turns back to give him and Michelle a sleazy smile before he follows after the women.

Once he’s gone Michelle rolls her eyes before she turns around to lean her body against the bar counter.

“Did you get the—” Peter goes to ask.

She nods wordlessly in answer to his question before he’s even got all his words out. “I need a drink first before we go, being around entitled White guys is draining.”

That gets a bemused snort out of Peter, the words more in keeping with the version of Michelle that resides in his memories.

She downs the rest of the champagne she left here earlier then takes a deep breath in and out, exhaling audibly before she turns and starts making her way through the crowds without even bothering to check if Peter is following after her.

Peter is right behind her as they head back to the door she’d come out of earlier with Joseph. Once they get there, she makes a grab for Peter’s hand and gently tugs at it so he’s standing right by her side then she turns to the two burly guards. “Hey, I left something back there earlier when I went in with Joey. Would it be okay if I could just…you know. We’ll be really quick, promise,” her tone has the same flirtatious lilt she used with Joseph and she throws the guards a wide grin for good measure.

The guards look at each other, their expressions clearly disbelieving and Peter would guess they probably think she wants to go to the bathroom to do lines because they turn back to them and shake their heads no.

“They’re cool, let them through,” Joseph slurs at the guards as he walks past them with his arms slung around each of the two women from earlier.

The guards look at each other once more before they let the two of them through with quiet, disapproving murmurs and shakes of their heads.

Once they’ve gone through the door and travelled down the hallway to put some distance between them and the guards, they come to a stop and she lets go of his hand. MJ carefully unclasps the necklace she has on and holds it in the palm of her hand before she presses down on the diamond embedded at the center of it. When she’s done she hands it over to Peter, allowing him to throw it up towards the ceiling with one hand whilst he uses the other to activate the web shooter concealed beneath his shirt sleeve to use his webbing to secure it to the ceiling.

“That’ll delete and loop all the footage from the cameras on this floor,” MJ explains as they start moving again once she’s satisfied it’s secure.

She walks slightly ahead of him whilst Peter continues to trail after her as they walk through the abandoned hallways, using the stolen ID card to get through any locked doors they come across. They are careful and quiet as to not be spotted by any guards as they head to where the blueprints of the building they studied last night had shown them the server room to be located.

Using Joseph’s ID card, they quietly and easily slip into the server room and close the door behind them once they reach it.

The air conditioning is on full blast, making the air within the large room cold in a way that causes Michelle to shiver and goosebumps to break out across her exposed arms but she either doesn’t notice or chooses to ignore it, wasting no time in walking past the rows of computer servers in search of a control panel they can plug the portable device they’d brought and download data.

When they find it, Peter quickly gets to work taking out the compact, foldable tablet she’d given to him to hide in his pockets since her dress didn’t have any. She gets to work connecting it to the servers and activates an automatic program, starting the process of transferring over data.

Michelle rests the device on the ground as they wait for it to finish downloading. It’s downloading at a quick speed but it would still take a few minutes considering the sheer size of all the data they were transferring—terabytes, if not close to petabytes of it.

Peter paces back and forth impatiently waiting for the data to be transferred whilst MJ for her part is casually leant against the opposite shelf, arms and legs crossed and the perfect picture of relaxation in direct contrast to his frayed nerves.

84%.

85%.

86%.

He suddenly stops in his tracks when he picks up the sound of a radio and footsteps approaching from the end of the hall.

 _“We’re on the northside of the building completing a check of the perimeter. Over_ ,” he hears who he assumes is a security guard say over their radio.

“Shit. Fuck. Shit,” Peter swears meaningfully, trying and failing to keep his panic at bay. “There are two security guards headed our way,” he tells MJ whilst his brain already wracks through two hundred different options for how the scenario could play out. They could easily take the two guards between the two of them, but if either of them alerted their team to their presence here in a cordoned off section of the gala then they are screwed.

He hurriedly looks down at the tablet to check on its progress; 92%.

“They won’t come in here, relax,” she says calmly. When he turns to look at her she’s looking down and inspecting her manicure intently rather than looking up at him, still unbothered.

98%.

99%.

100%.

As soon as the data has fully downloaded, Peter rushes to disconnect everything before folding up the tablet and cord and shoving them back into his pocket. “Let’s go, come on,” he says urgently before wrapping a hand around Michelle’s wrist to drag her after him so they can leave the server room and head back to the event.

He pokes his head out of the door whilst holding Michelle back behind him to check if the guards have gone past. Once he’s satisfied they’re clear he walks out with his hand still wrapped around Michelle so she’s following after him.

“Let me go,” she says, her annoyance apparent as she shakes his hand off once they start heading back the way they came to go back to the gala before their absence is noticed.

Peter freezes in place, causing her to bump into his back and he can tell she’s about to say something, likely some expression of her increasing annoyance at him, when he turns back. “They’re coming back this way,” he tells her, not having to clarify who he means by “they”.

He turns back around to look at their surroundings and try to come up with a plan of action. They could just wait out in the open and fight the guards once they reach them, he could carry her and spider-stick to the ceiling whilst the guards walk past below them, they could—

He’s broken out of his spiral by MJ’s ever calm and collected tone. “In here.”

He doesn’t hesitate to follow her through the door she’s just opened with the stolen ID card into a room that he sees is a small office once the overhead lights flicker on when the sensors detect their presence in the room.

He quietly shuts the door behind them as Michelle goes to perch on the edge of the table whilst he stays by the door with his ear pressed to the wood, listening out for the guards to go past so they can continue making their way back.

“Hey, I think I saw something down there. Someone is in one of the offices,” Peter hears one of the security guards tell the other one.

“Let’s quickly check it out then head back.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Peter whispers.

“Come here,” Michelle whispers to him.

He turns back to look at her and finds her sitting with her legs crossed, her face the picture of relaxed boredom. He narrows his eyes at her, “What?”

“I said, come here,” she says it more forcefully though she doesn’t raise her voice beyond a quiet whisper.

Still confused, he approaches her hesitantly. When he gets close to her she grabs both lapels of his tuxedo blazer and pulls him in and before Peter has any time to react, their lips are colliding in a searing kiss.

He tries to keep an ear out for the security guards but MJ grazes a path across his top lip with her tongue, confident and tawdry, and Peter half shudders and willingly opens his mouth up to her, his attention momentarily distracted away from the looming threat of discovery.

The kiss deepens as he steps into the space between her legs that MJ has created for him, and though it’s been so long since he’s kissed her, he finds it exceedingly easy to get lost in the sensations she draws out of him, to surrender completely to her.

One of his hands rests along the angle of her jaw, grabbing her chin to roughly tilt her face up towards his. His other hand smooths down across the bare skin between her shoulder blades, down across the corset of her dress until it lands on the smooth satin over her lower back, then he drags her along the wooden table so she’s precariously balancing on the edge, his solid body stopping her from toppling over.

The move causes her dress to ride further up her waist, her center now making contact with where he’s starting to harden in his slacks. She puts a hand over his which still rests on her lower back and directs it to her leg which is exposed by the deep slit of her dress before she starts working on undoing his trousers.

Peter quickly lets go of her face and uses his now free hand to sweep the skirt of her dress aside so he can slide both hands along the smooth skin of her bare thighs, climbing up higher and higher as MJ’s breath starts to come out is short, breathless pants.

He stops along his path when one of his hands hits a small thigh holster she has concealed beneath her dress. He blindly fumbles with the small buckle and loosens it slightly, allowing him to sneak his hand beneath the strap so he can trace a path around the warm skin there at the same time as he takes her bottom lip and tugs at it with his teeth before soothing the sting with his tongue.

MJ to moans, loud and drawn-out, in a sound that travels straight to his groin and causes him to groan in response, uninhibited. He’s distantly aware of the security guards having stopped by the door, clearly having heard the sounds the pair of them are making but he finds that he doesn’t care when MJ pushes his trousers down and starts sloppily palming him. Her movements are careless, barely making contact with where he’s half-hard and aching with want but it’s enough to get Peter to moan lowly.

A fog of lust clouds his mind, taking away any thoughts that rattle around his brain that are not Michelle, or Mary Jane, or Black Cat, or whatever the fuck she goes by nowadays. He doesn’t care, so overcome by an overwhelming desire that he’s startled when the door behind him finally bursts open even though he knew the guards were coming.

“You can’t be he—uh,” one of the guards starts before pausing, the amusement in his voice at the sight the two of them must make clear in his tone, though he tries his best to contain his laughter. The other guard beside him isn’t so successful at hiding his laughter.

“Oh, oops,” MJ says with a faked giggle, pushing Peter away from her slightly after taking a moment to subtlely adjust her thigh holster whilst he tries to pull his trousers back up.

“You two can’t be here, you should leave,” the guard says once he’s gotten a handle on his laughter.

“Right, right,” MJ says as she shoves him aside and hops off the table. “We’ll head back right now.” Another giggle, followed by her stumbling on her feet slightly, playing drunk. “We’re so, so sorry,” she apologises sheepishly, pausing to crouch down and slip her heels off before she goes out of the office.

Peter is just about to follow after her when one of the guards stops him, clears his throat then gestures towards the crotch area of his trousers, making Peter realise he didn’t properly zip himself up. The embarrassment and the blush that spreads across his face are both genuine, helping to sell their cover story that they’re two drunken guests who’d wondered off in search of somewhere private to hook up.

“Uh, thanks,” Peter mumbles out after righting himself before he quickly follows after MJ.

When he nears her she grabs his hand then drags him after her as they head back to the gala with the guards following closely behind them, meaning they don’t have time to collect the CCTV corrupting device.

Once they’re back out on the main floor with guests, she wastes no time in leading him towards the exit, both having realised it’d only be a matter of time before they either realised the CCTV footage was looped or found the device webbed to the ceiling.

Just as they’re turning to leave the building, they’re stopped in their tracks by their old friend Joseph. “Coming to the after party?” he asks MJ, pointedly ignoring Peter.

“I’m gonna have to skip it tonight,” MJ says with a faux-apologetic tone. “Let me make it up to you,” she fumbles around going through the pockets of Peter’s blazer, hands lingering more than is necessary, until she gets out the very same device they’d just used to steal data and with a few swipes, transfers over an amount that makes Peter’s eyes widen when he notes how many zeroes there are before he catches himself and takes the tablet back to slip it into his pocket. “There’s my donation, lover,” she says with a wink.

Peter nearly wants to ask her how it is that she even has that kind of money before he remembers that information is not the only thing she’s stolen over the last few months.

Joseph nods his head approvingly before stepping closer to wrap his arms around MJ in a hug that’s definitely not platonic, pushing Peter aside in the process. “Next time you’re in town, you can call me for a good time. Or maybe I’ll come to you in Chicago,” he mumbles as he bids her farewell.

MJ presses a kiss against his cheek before pulling away and grabbing Peter’s hand to lead him out of the gala.

Once they’re out of the main hall, the smile on her face turns into a scowl as she pauses momentarily to put her stilettos back on. She takes a moment to smooth the material of her dress down and neaten her hair before she takes off ahead of him, graceful and composed in direct contrast to the way she’d been stumbling around acting drunk and like she couldn’t keep her hands off him just moments before.

They’re just settling into her car when she turns to him, “See how much more fun it is to work together instead of you being a nuisance and getting in my way?”

Peter just shakes his head instead of offering her a response.

* * *

After making a stop to grab some food on the way, they arrive back at his apartment close to midnight.

Peter gets to work connecting the tablet up to his laptop, and has a basic program he’d created back in his college days start to sweep through the bytes of data in search of anything of interest whilst he digs into the pizza they’d got on the way, his stomach is happy to eat proper food after a night of nothing but bite-sized fancy food.

MJ meanwhile heads to his bathroom to check on her wound after the strain she’s sure to have put on it tonight he presumes.

She comes back a few minutes later and walks up to the coffee table to grab a slice before she heads to the corkboard to look it over. She’d called it cute when she saw it before as he transferred her from the bedroom to the bathroom to patch her up, during a rare moment where she was conscious and coherent.

“Where’d you get this?” She asks suddenly, tearing his attention away from the laptop screen to her where he sees that she’s pointing to the grainy CCTV shot of her he got from the NYPD database which is right at the top of his board. “Been stalking me, spidey?”

“What? No, it’s from the NYPD,” Peter says rolling his eyes to distract away from the heat he can feel rising up his neck which is likely to be followed by a rush of blood.

“So you _are_ a cop. Figures,” she says with a snort before turning back around to study everything he has pinned up on the board.

Peter huffs incredulously, “I’m not a cop and you know that. Anyway, the NYPD would sooner lock me up and throw me in the raft than ever work with me.”

MJ just hums wordlessly like she doesn’t believe him at all before she goes back to looking intently over his board and Peter continues to watch her, trying to solve the puzzle that is Michelle Jones.

“So,” Peter says after a stretch of silence, finally deciding to utilise this opportunity to ask her all the questions he’s been dying to since she showed up in his life again, the unanswered questions that hang in the air between them. “Are you gonna tell me how you came to be a cat burglar who dresses in a tight black suit and robs criminals?”

“No,” she responds easily without bothering to turn to look at him.

“What about why you want to find out the identity of Romita’s boss so badly?”

Once again, he’s met with more of the same mono-syllabic answers he’d got from her when he tried to question her when she first turned up here.

Peter huffs out a loud sigh that’s equal parts exhausted as it is frustrated, and at the sound of it she finally turns away from the board and starts heading to sit down on the couch next to him.

“I’ve told you everything you need you know.”

Everything he needs to know is apparently limited to Romita’s business operations and nothing more, nothing he actually wants to know.

A tense silence unreels between them, Peter looking at her with open, pleading eyes that beg her to open up to him, to give him _something_.

“What happened to you?” This time he asks the question in a quiet whisper. “Why did you just leave?” He asks, going impossibly quieter.

Where before MJ had avoided looking even in his vague direction, she finally looks up to meet his gaze and it’s only then that Peter realises how they’d subconsciously drifted closer to each other on the couch bringing her close enough for him to hear the way her breath hitches whether at his questions or their proximity, he doesn’t know.

Still keeping his volume low, “I spent all night on your fire escape waiting for you, you know.”

Finally MJ speaks, “Peter, I—”

Anything she might have said is interrupted by the laptop beeping, signalling that his program has finished combing through everything.

Deciding to shelve this conversation for later, he looks turns to look at the screen where he finds files with invoices that link various trafficking operations—drugs, weapons, _humans_ — across the city to Black Rose Mining. All of it will be enough to send Romita back to prison, hopefully for good this time, and more importantly, it’ll help shut down various criminal operations across New York and New Jersey. It’s everything MJ had promised she could get him if he helped her, more than, even.

“Holy fuck,” Peter breathes out as he leans back in his seat trying to process the magnitude of this discovery. He looks over it again, still not believing he really has all this information. “This is huge, MJ.”

When he turns to look at her he finds her focused on the information displayed on the screen but her facial expression doesn’t mirror the excitement of his own. Instead, she looks almost disappointed. “Any clues to who Romita’s boss is?”

“Uh,” Peter hesitates as he quickly scans the names, recognising most of them from the NYPD case files he’d read through when Romita was arrested back when he was in college. “These names are mostly low level people—street dealers and people who work under Romita.”

She stands up abruptly and walks back towards his corkboard before she suddenly pulls it off the wall and forcibly shoves it to the ground in a fit of rage. “I need to know who he is,” she gets out in a quiet whisper, her voice shaking with unbridled anger that thrums beneath the surface.

Peter tries to calm her down, to placate her. “When we hand over this stuff to the authorities they’ll launch an investigation and they can find out who’s running this whole operation. They have more manpower.”

“That wasn’t the deal!” She snaps as she turns back to him. “You help me get the files and the name of Romita’s boss, and I’d give you everything you need to take down their entire criminal operation. That was the deal!”

“Michelle—”

Whatever he was about to say to her dies down in his throat when her anger dissipates and gives way to sadness as tears start falling down her face. In a much quieter voice she speaks again, “Whoever he is, he did something to her. She found out things— knew too much and he did something to her, I just know it. I need to find him. I need—” She pauses, takes a slow breath in and out to calm herself down and stop the wobble of her chin before continuing, “I just need answers.”

Multiple questions race through Peter’s mind about who _she_ is and what it is she supposedly knew that got her into trouble but none of it matters when he notes the sorrow that mars her face, the signs of loss that he knows all too well that are etched into her face— from her furrowed brow, to her tearful eyes, to her downturned mouth. He has some of his answers about what her endgame is, finally, but he did not imagine it would be something that is so painfully relatable.

He's not sure if MJ sees the understanding that dawns on his face, but whatever she sees proves to be too much because she turns away from him to face the wall again.

“I’ll, uh, I’ll manually comb through everything and have another look,” he says, speaking around the lump that’s formed in his throat.

MJ doesn’t turn around to face him, but he sees the way her shoulders shake as she starts to quietly cry.

He hesitates as he debates whether to get up and go and comfort her before he realises that whilst in the past he might have wrapped her up in his arms and hugged her tightly to his chest to comfort her the way he knew would help her, he doesn’t know the woman who stands in front of him anymore, doesn’t know how to even begin to comfort her.

So instead he quietly turns back to the laptop and starts to sift through each file one by one until he comes across one that seems out of place with just a string of nonsensical numbers, letters and special characters where the other files are named with a shorthand Peter had guessed notes what operation specifically each file is about.

A new program pops up on his laptop as soon as he clicks on the file, “ _D347HS74R_ ”, and starts to delete all the data from his laptop and the tablet still connected to it.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Peter mumbles when he realises what’s happening.

“Do something!” MJ screams at him when she notices what’s happening, rushing to unplug her tablet from his laptop.

He tries to terminate the program and salvage as much data as he can, but it’s too late. The program is far too advanced for Peter and his basic software knowledge he’d acquired from his undergrad to do anything about. All he can do is stare at the now black screen, the program having deleted everything and shut his laptop down in the process.

Suddenly, it all hits him at once.

A memory of a conversation he had with May several weeks ago during their last Sunday lunch before he’d started avoiding her entirely springs to mind. There is something she said to him that had seemed insignificant at the time so he hadn’t given it much thought, leading him to miss a vital piece of information.

But now all the pieces of information start to come together: the tech firm, _Mariana Inc._ , which had seemed vaguely familiar to him during his research, the carefully engineered digital presence of the firm and its subsidiaries, the advanced program that had instantly deleted all the data they’d stolen— “D347HS74R”.

 _DEATHSTAR_.

Like a fog clearing, Peter finally understands what has been right in front of him all along that he’d ignored or perhaps had been too blinded to see.

 _Shit_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just some little fun facts/asides about the chapter: I've been rewatching 'daredevil' on netflix recently (may he rip) and lots of it has been unintentionally bleeding into my writing w this chapter being just one example of this and it's inspired by ep 2x06 lol. Also MJ's gala dress is clearly Z's 2019 Emmys one bc...why wouldn't it be?
> 
> Idk who started the "MJ faked her death" theory in the comments and it's been fun to ~~fuck w you all~~ misdirect you all, but hope this chapter has started to provide some clarity (w more answers to come dw). I think the updating every other Wednesday thing works really well for me so I'm gonna stick to it, meaning chap 5 should hopefully be out on the 25th. That's enough rambling from me. Hope you enjoyed this latest chapter. And as always, comments and kudos are much appreciated!!
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://tvfanatic97-2.tumblr.com) and on [twitter](https://twitter.com/dayaspsychic) x


	5. With Friends Like These

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for this chapter: mentions of cancer.

Peter doesn’t tell MJ about his discovery, or well, what he _thinks_ he has discovered. Firstly, he could very well be wrong. The Ned Leeds he knows and has known since their first day of Elementary School when they’d bonded over Ned’s Star Wars-themed back pack, would never get involved with criminals.

There is a voice, quiet yet loud at the same time, at the back of his head that tells him that he has no idea what’s been going on in Ned’s life because he hasn’t spoken to him in nearly eleven months with the last conversation the two of them had not having been a particularly friendly one; Peter cringes at the memory of some of the things he’d said to Ned, lashing out at him in his grief. But Peter dismisses that doubting voice, because it’s _Ned_.

Secondly, if he were to tell MJ about his suspicions he doesn’t know what she’d do with that information. Gone is the girl he once knew, shy and awkward in a way that endeared him to her and did nothing for his blossoming crush, leaving in her place a woman who is deadly, more than willing to toe— _cross_ , even— the line.

Instead, he decides to do some more investigating and gather more evidence to back up his currently unsubstantiated suspicions before deciding on the best course of action. Which means he decides to watch Ned.

Peter watches Ned as he goes from his apartment to an office building in Midtown Manhattan that he finds out houses _Mariana Inc_. The building is unassuming, boring in its ordinariness, and does not look at all like the potential headquarters of a criminal enterprise potentially worth billions of dollars.

When Peter can get out of work with excuses about assignments and needing to go out and take some photos, he watches the building during the day to see if he catches anything of note but all he sees are people sitting at their desks on computers, exactly what you’d expect for a tech company.

He also watches Ned when he’s not at work and starts to get a feel for his routine. Work Monday through to Friday, 9am to 5pm. Lunch by himself in Bryant Park at some point during that 9 to 5pm window. When the day is done he goes to his apartment, spending the evening working, gaming or watching TV before he goes to bed, ready for another day of the same monotonous routine.

Sometimes Ned’s co-workers invite him out to drinks after work, but he politely declines each time. Nothing interesting or exciting happens; Peter’s relieved that he doesn’t see Ned going to shady warehouses or dealing with shady types over the week he watches him but part of him is saddened to see Ned lead such a reclusive life—extroverted Ned who thrives off socialising and being around people. Peter feels a niggling guilt over having shut him out, that he has no idea what’s been happening in his best friend’s life over the past eleven months that has him so closed off, so melancholic and unlike himself.

His answer comes on the Saturday.

Peter goes to Ned’s apartment to watch him as he’s been doing all week. And when Ned leaves the apartment to drive to his parents’ house, somewhere Peter hasn’t been since Ned’s parents held a joint party to celebrate the two of them securing PhD posts at ESU a few years back, Peter follows him there.

He watches as Ned picks his dad up then drives him to Manhattan, right to Memorial Sloan Kettering. Peter is well aware of what this hospital in particular specialises in and he’s hit with a sudden, overwhelming wave of guilt because he’s able to draw conclusions about what he’s seeing in front of him and about everything that he’s missed in the last eleven months that’s been happening in his best friend’s life. He cannot believe that’d he’s been so overcome with his grief that he could not see a world beyond himself and his own pain.

A wave of nausea and a ruthless, ravenous guilt overcomes him so much that he has to leave immediately.

He swings around the city aimlessly, looking for distractions in the form of trouble. He finds some pick-pockets and car jackers who he stops easily with very few of them resisting or trying to fight him the way he so badly wants, practically vibrating with the desire for a physical challenge that’ll get his mind off what he saw with Ned this morning.

When Peter winds up beating some sleazebag who was harassing women going past him to a bloody pulp, to the point where blood is gushing out of his nose and his blackened eyes are swollen shut, he decides it’s time to call it a day despite it only being 6pm on a Saturday evening. His head is elsewhere and he knows he’ll do more damage than good if he stays out on patrol longer, taking out his feelings of guilt and worthlessness on unassuming petty criminals and douchebags on the street.

Instead he opts to go back to his apartment. The exhaustion of past few weeks, past few _months_ , along with the ever-looming and all-consuming feelings of guilt have him so spent and tired that he passes out as soon as he gets back to the apartment. Then he sleeps, and sleeps.

* * *

In the days following his week of spying of Ned, Peter sort of aimlessly wonders between work and the gloomy apartment, an overwhelming feeling of depersonalisation overcoming him to the point where he stops going on patrol, stops getting suited up and avoids anything related to his superhero gig— Ned, MJ, and anything to do with Romita or _Black Rose Mining_ or _Mariana Inc_. None of it.

Maybe if he just ignores it all, it’ll all go away and he can be transported back to a time before all of this mess, a time when he was content, building a life with the love of his life and didn’t have to worry about supervillains with vendettas who would go after those closest to him to hurt Spider-Man or about high school ex-girlfriends crashing back into his life to wreak havoc, and mostly, a time where he didn’t have to carry this loss and pervasive emptiness with him day and day out.

He falls back into his usual routine because that’s all he can do.

Monday to Friday: jumping out of bed after having slept through his alarm, again, exhausted and far from rested before getting himself out of his apartment just in the nick of time, hair messy and shirt wrinkled, and riding the subway to work where has a breakfast of a stale bagel in the cramped carriage whilst on his way.

At work he divides his time up between enduring verbal abuse from J Jonah Jameson, taking photographs to go with any upcoming Daily Bugle articles – from the opening of some new hipster café with a novelty whether that be cats or claims that all the coffee is made of monkey poop, to pictures of his alter-ego in action, to key political figures during the times Liz from the politics desk drags him to an event – and politely dodging the attempts both Cindy and Abe make at him, along with avoiding any social interaction not work-related, all while trying to not nod off at any given moment given his bone-deep tiredness.

When he’s endured another work day he makes the dreaded journey back to his quiet apartment with its suffocating aura of foreignness and melancholy, except now he doesn’t even have it in him to suit up and go out on patrol. Instead just holes up in his apartment, surrounding himself with all the clothes that once belonged to her in hopes that he can find some comfort in being surrounded by her belongings, by her scent. But it’s been so long that the clothes just smell of dust and mothballs, any trace of her already fading in a way that frightens him.

Six days into his slump it all becomes a bit too much for him to cope with so he goes the one place he knows he can always go when he needs a helping hand: May.

His aunt opens the door, takes one look at him and immediately rushes forward to wrap him up in her arms, standing on her tippy toes to allow her to reach up to him and it’s like everything between them, the arguments about Peter needing therapy and the past few weeks where Peter has dodged her attempts to talk to him, all just melt away into insignificance. They stand there in the apartment doorway, embracing, for an unknowable stretch of time as Peter silently cries into her shoulder.

Once he’s gotten a hold of himself they eventually pull apart and May leads him into the apartment where she guides him onto the couch and drapes the throw that hangs over the back of the couch over him before she pads to the kitchen.

She comes back moments later with a cup of hot cocoa she hands to him before settling next to him, close enough that she can run a hand through his hair. He’s transported to his childhood where May used to do this exact same thing after he’d have had a nightmare about his parents not long after he moved in with her and Ben, and part of Peter wants to be embarrassed that he’d need this kind of juvenile comfort as an adult but the other part of him revels in her maternal affections, takes in the comfort of her touch and of her presence and allows it to settle him.

After he’s finished his hot chocolate he eventually speaks, keeping his voice low and barely above a whisper, “I’ve let so many people down.”

“No you haven’t, Pete,” she says it so assuredly, like it’s a fact. Peter wants to believe her because May always knows best, but how can he? May carries on, “You haven’t let anyone down. You’ve been through a lot in the past year and everyone who loves you knows—”

“I know about Ned’s dad,” he interjects before she says anymore to try and comfort him and abate some of his guilt.

May doesn’t ask what he means, confirming his suspicions that she already knew given that she has weekly catch up calls with Ned. Peter wants to blow up at her to ask her why she didn’t tell him but really this isn’t on her, she’s not the one who was so overcome with grief that she shut her best friend out when they were going through something difficult.

“Have you spoken to Ned?”

“I—” Peter starts to say before hesitating.

“You should go and talk to him,” May tells him firmly.

“I don’t know how to face him when I haven’t spoken to him in such a long time and I—” he hesitates again, stopping himself from mentioning anything about the company Ned works for.

“If you feel so bad about shutting him out and not being there for him as he deals with his dad’s illness then you need to go and see him,” May is insistent. “I know the last time the two of you spoke things weren’t the best, but Ned doesn’t blame you for any of it.”

Peter lets out a humourless scoff, “He _should_ blame me. I was a dick to him.”

May grasps his hands in her own and waits until he’s looking into her eyes before speaking. “You were a dick to him,” she tells him, though not unkindly. “But Ned doesn’t blame you, he understands what you were going through at the time. That’s in the past and right now Ned needs his best friend.” She squeezes his hands to drive her point home.

He lets out a shaky, audible exhale, getting a hold of himself before he starts crying. “Okay, you’re right.”

“Of course I am,” May says with a casual shrug before throwing him a wink.

The two of them exchange small grins before Peter starts to get up. “There’s something I’ve gotta do.”

“That’s my boy,” she says encouragingly as she gets up with him to take the throw from him.

Peter is halfway out of the front door when May calls out to him, “Pete, you should also come around to just spend time with your old aunt sometimes. Not just because you need something from me, you hear?”

He laughs before doubling back to go and give her a hug before he presses a kiss to the top of her head. “I’m sorry about the last few weeks, promise we can grab a bite soon.”

“Yeah, we better.”

“Love you,” he shouts back as he’s heading out of the door again.

He stops by the alleyway next to May’s apartment and fishes his suit out of his backpack to change into it, just like old times, deciding he can get to Ned’s quicker this way. Once he’s in his suit he hurriedly makes his way to Ned’s, feeling determined and fortified after May’s pep talk.

Except once he gets to Ned’s apartment he suddenly balks again and ends up awkwardly hovering on the fire escape of his apartment, frozen in place and unsure about how to proceed or what he’ll even say to Ned.

As he’s in the process of trying to psych himself up to either knock on the fourth floor window or change out of his suit and go via the front door instead given that it’s been so long, Ned appears in front of the window looking out at him with his eyebrows furrowed in confusion at his presence.

“Peter?”

So Peter’s really doing this. “Hey, Ned,” he greets sheepishly before the pair of them just stand there looking at each other, neither moving or saying anything else.

Eventually, Ned clears his throat, then, “Uh, do you—do you want to come in?”

Peter hesitates momentarily before agreeing, and his heart constricts in his chest at how things can be so awkward between him and his best friend of over twenty years in a way they’ve never been before.

Peter waits for Ned to close the window and blinds before taking off his mask, then he just hovers in the center of the living room, unsure of what to do in a way he’s never felt around Ned or in this apartment that he used to come to weekly to hang out if they weren’t at his apartment.

“Do you want a drink or anything?” Ned asks, cutting through the uncomfortable silence.

“No, no, I’m good. Thanks though.”

“Cool.” A pause. “Do you want to sit?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he perches awkwardly on the furthest end of the three-seater couch whilst Ned perches on the armchair.

“Did May—”

“I just wanna—”

The two of them start to speak at the same time before stopping when they realise they’re speaking over each other. They awkwardly gesture for the other one to go first. This goes on for a few moments until Ned insists Peter says what he wants to say first.

Peter takes a deep breath in and then out, composing himself and psyching himself up at the same time before he starts to talk, “I’m sorry about how I treated you last time we spoke.” He pauses to gather himself before carrying on, “I was hurting but that’s no excuse for the things I said and for the way I pushed you away.”

“I don’t hold it against you, Peter. I get that you were hurting, but I was hurting too; I lost her, too,” Ned responds without looking up at him, instead choosing to focus on his wringing hands in his lap.

“I know, and I’m sorry.” All Peter can do is apologize at this point.

“It hurt when you pushed me away like that, I just wanted to be there for you.”

“I know,” he repeats. After a pause, “I can never undo the damage I did or take back the hurtful things I said, but if you’ll let me, I want to be there for you now.”

His words finally get Ned to look up at him, his eyes narrowing questioningly. “You know about…”

Peter wordlessly nods. “I’m so sorry I haven’t been here for you Ned. I can’t even imagine how tough it’s all been.”

Ned just shrugs almost indifferently but Peter doesn’t miss the flash of hurt on his face. “It’s been really, really hard, yeah. But he’s getting the best care and all the best cancer treatment available so all we can do is wait and hope, I guess.”

Before he can second guess himself, Peter moves to stand and perch on the other end of the couch that’s closer to the armchair so he can reach his hands out to rest over Ned’s in a gesture he hopes is comforting.

The pair stay like that for a while until Ned eventually gets up out of his seat, “How about that drink now?”

Peter snorts bemusedly. “Maybe a beer wouldn’t hurt.”

Ned chuckles and shakes his head before he heads to his kitchen, returning a few moments later with a six pack of beers.

The two of them make their way through the six pack as they chat and catch each other up on things that they’ve missed, though conversation doesn’t flow as naturally as it once would’ve done, a stiltedness resulting from the passage of time, along with the way they avoid talking about his dad’s diagnosis colouring the conversation. There’s also the other elephant in the room about Ned’s employer.

Peter is debating how to bring up Ned’s work in a tactful way when Ned does it for him, “Honestly I’m lucky about the pay rise that came with this new job, no way I’d have been able to afford any of this with the shitty lab assistant pay.”

“Oh, yeah? Where are you working?” Peter asks in a tone he hopes in casual and unassuming.

“Tech company called _Mariana Inc._ They head hunted me straight out of Octavius’ lab and honestly, I probably would’ve said no but they were offering me a significant pay bump that meant my parents wouldn’t have to dip into Aaron and Monica’s college funds to pay for tatay’s treatment.”

Peter’s heart breaks, suddenly realising that his friend was forced into this situation of working with criminals to pay for his dad’s medical care and Peter didn’t know anything about it because he’d decided to be a selfish asshole instead of being there for his friend. Maybe if he hadn’t pushed Ned away, maybe if he’d called him sooner, maybe—

“You already knew that didn’t you?” Ned asks, interrupting Peter’s spiralling guilt. It’s been nearly a year since they’ve spoken or hung out but Ned knows him well, well enough to see through his bullshit.

He considers denying it but decides it’s not worth lying, instead what he says is, “Did you know? About the kind of people that you work for?”

Ned’s face is distraught, his remorse and guilt apparent. “Not to start with, no. It just seemed like an ordinary engineering job designing software for different clients but then my assignments gradually started getting weirder and weirder. They’d ask me to encrypt files but without telling me what the files were or who the client was and I got curious and took a peek at some of them and that’s when I realised I was doing IT for criminals.” He pauses, playing with the label of his beer bottle nervously for a moment. “But by then it was too late. We’d started the first round of chemo and if I quit we wouldn’t be able to pay for the rest of it so I had to stay. You have to understand Peter, I had no choice.”

Peter thinks about the lengths he would go to if he’d been in Ned’s shoes, if it’d been May who was sick. He can’t say for certain what he’d have done in the situation but he gets it so he just smiles sympathetically at Ned, wordlessly communicating that he does understand.

“That’s not even the worst part of it,” Ned says, continuing after a pause.

Peter sits up in his chair, turning all his attention to Ned for him to continue.

“The real reason they hired me is because they wanted me to help them replicate a weapon Octavius designed that he’d refused to sell to them. They figured since I worked under him I could help them with the missing components,” Ned says with a laugh though it is completely devoid of any humour.

“Jesus,” Peter whispers.

“I tried to tell them I didn’t know anything and couldn’t help them but then they knew about my dad and they threatened my family so I had to give them something. I’ve given them bits and pieces and tried to prolong the development process but they’re close to cracking it.” He pauses and Peter sees the tremor in his hands, his voice growing shaky along with it, too. “And Peter, if they have this weapon they can shut down entire power grids, and any computers or electronics within the weapon’s attack radius. They can cripple the entire city and kill thousands just like that.”

The weight of the Ned’s words have Peter leaning back on the couch, completely overwhelmed. There are so many questions that rattle around in his head; why would Dr Octavius even develop something like that? Is this what the woman MJ mentioned found out? Is this why she has been after these people all along?

“Ned,” Peter starts, keeping his voice even and steady. “I can help to stop all of this and get you out but I need to know who is running this whole operation. Just give me a name.”

“I—” he starts, pauses, then, “I don’t know, I’m sorry. I was spooked after they let me know they could get to my family.”

Peter runs a hand through his hair, tugging at it as he considers what to do. He knows what he has to do, he just doesn’t know if he can ask it of his best friend.

“Ned—”

“Peter, my family.”

“I know that I’m asking for a lot from you but I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important. I have to stop them once and for all before it’s too late, and I can’t do that without your help.”

He doesn’t respond, just considers his request for a long stretch of time.

Eventually, “Okay.” Peter almost sighs audibly in relief. Ned continues, “I’ll do some digging and see what I can find. Come back here on Friday night.”

“Thank you Ned.”

Ned’s tone turns more sombre, “I’m trusting you here, Peter. There’s a lot on the line.”

Peter doesn’t need Ned to remind him of what’s at stake here, he knows and it almost makes him paralytic with fear but he decides to use that fear to drive him to act instead. He reaches a hand forward to rest on Ned’s shoulder which he gives a gentle squeeze before he says, “I know. I won’t let you down.” The _again_ goes unsaid.

Soon after Peter bids his friend farewell and puts his mask back on to make his way back to his apartment.

* * *

Friday cannot come soon enough for Peter. He still hasn’t told MJ about Ned’s involvement in all this or Ned about MJ’s involvement, figuring he can get the information he needs out of Ned then maybe pass it onto MJ on the condition that she doesn’t do anything rash with it and agrees to work with him to take them down.

Feeling a new sense of resolve and determination, he arrives at Ned’s at 7pm as they’d agreed in their texts. Ned greets him and leads him into the apartment where he has pizza for the two of them.

Ned informs him he couldn’t find a name but found loads of information for them to sift through that hopefully, through working together they can use to get to the identity of the big boss.

The two of them hunker down for the night, fuelled by pizza and energy drinks, and start to work through all the files Ned found along with the little intel Peter had managed to gather to help them start to get an idea of everyone involved and the hierarchy of this criminal organisation.

They work together in a way that reminds Peter so much of when the two of them would pull all-nighters in their shared apartment back during their ESU days on the nights before big exams in their shared modules. It makes Peter realise just how much he’d missed his best friend and just how lonely he has been over the last year.

They carry on working for a few hours, managing to establish that Romita, Tombstone and every other crime boss in the city have all been working together under this new boss, whoever they are. Peter can sense that they’re close to uncovering the identity of the person behind everything.

He and Ned are in the process of looking through corporate registration documents on _Mariana Inc._ and every front company associated with Romita and all the other crime families’ criminal activities, hoping they can get some answers by approaching this from the legitimate side of business when Ned suddenly excuses himself to the bathroom, citing the caffeine as the reason.

Peter doesn’t think much of it, barely paying attention to what Ned says as he carries on looking through the boring legal documents.

The name Vanessa Mariana, as in _Mariana Inc.,_ keeps popping up as the resident agent on filing for a lot of the documents he looks through but when he searches up the name all he finds is a news report about a car crash nearly six years ago in which the woman and a young boy named Richard died on the scene. Peter can’t decide whether that’s significant or not so puts it aside for the time being before he carries on looking through pages and pages of legal documents.

The process is tedious and extremely boring, which isn’t helped by Peter’s pre-existing sleep deprivation so he downs the energy drink Ned offered him earlier during the night. The caffeine is starting to make his senses go all out-of-whack the way caffeine always does but he ignores it, ploughing on with the task at hand.

Peter looks to the clock and sees that it’s just gone five minutes past midnight, nearly thirty minutes since Ned said he was going to pee. He focuses his senses and hears that Ned is indeed in the bathroom but even from here, he can hear the way his heart is racing, clearly nervous.

He gets out of his seat and start to slowly head towards the bathroom. “Ned? Are you good?” Peter calls out as he makes his way down the hall.

There’s a prickling sensation at the back of his neck which does nothing to settle the feeling he has that something isn’t right. “Ned?!” he tries again, more frantic this time.

He turns on his heels to head back to the living area; he didn’t bring his suit but he has his web shooters in the backpack just in case of emergency and this feels like it could be an emergency.

He’s just got his web shooters on and secured them to his wrists when something in him tells him to duck and get away from the windows but he’s too late, the caffeine having dulled his danger sense. Before he can leap over the couch the glass of the window shatters, sending shards flying everywhere, and a bullet lodges itself in his neck.

Peter has been shot plenty in his 27 years of life so he’s very familiar with the way a bullet pierces skin, destroying bodily structures in its path. This bullet stops in its tracks once it has pierced skin, then he feels it dispense something straight into his carotid which has his head feeling woozy within an instant.

He fights to stay standing upright to look for the shooter as his body once again goes into overdrive to try and metabolize and excrete whatever poison the bullet has put into his body the way his body usually does when he’s been shot with tranquilizers. But whatever the substance he’s been poisoned with is, it’s something that even with his enhanced metabolism he cannot get rid of faster than it is binding to cells in his body. All his body can do is delay the inevitable.

The room around him starts to spin and everything sounds distorted like he is under water. His spider sense is going haywire in a way it has never done before, even in the early days before Peter got a handle on his powers.

He’s startled by Ned calling out to him, stood just five feet away and Peter has no idea when he even got there. “ _I’m so sorry Peter_.” He thinks Ned might be crying, but all the sounds around him—the fridge, the traffic outside, Ned’s voice, his own heartbeat—have blended together into an incoherent cacophony that he can barely pick out Ned’s voice. “ _They got to my family Peter, I’m sorry._ ”

Peter tries to speak, to reassure his oldest friend that everything is going to be okay, but his tongue is like lead in his mouth rendering him completely unable to speak.

He collapses onto the floor, bashing his head on the corner of the table on the way down, and the last thing he sees before he passes out is a group of men with assault rifles enter Ned's apartment, knocking Ned out before they head towards him with their guns raised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I'm updating later than I said I would. This fic was meant to be a slightly dark and sexy au to cater specifically to Machi's tastes but it's sort of getting away from me and kinda turning into something else, idek what, lol. I know the pacing of this chap was weird and things were a little (a lot) rushed but I'm trying to work through some kinks writing-wise. Pls just bare with me.  
> Anyways, hope you enjoyed this latest chapter. As always, comments and kudos are much appreciated!!!
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://tvfanatic97-2.tumblr.com/) and on [twitter](https://twitter.com/dayaspsychic) should you want x


	6. Nothing Can Stop the Kingpin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for this chapter: torture. It's not explicit and is mostly mentioned rather than shown, but still.

Peter wakes with a start, head heavy and pounding painfully. He feels groggy and he’s disoriented with no recollection of where he is or how he got here. He struggles to rouse to full consciousness, his mind starting then stopping, starting then stopping again like an old computer whirring to life, an old truck whose ignition is bust attempting to start.

Then slowly, bit by bit in a trickle, everything starts to come back to him: the tranquilizer, the men who’d taken him, Ned… _Michelle_ , all of it.

He panics, suddenly aware of the fact that his hands and feet are tightly bound by something, holding him captive and in place. When he tries to open his eyes he’s hit with a barrage of sensory input that’s dizzying, the images of everything in front of him forming a mirage he can’t make sense of. His other senses aren’t faring too well either, the noises in whatever room he’s being held in have blended into one incoherent mess and he can’t distinguish what’s relevant and what’s not, can’t tune out the sounds of the city and focus the way he usually can without having to think about it.

Whatever they drugged him with is still messing with his head, fucking up his natural senses and his additional spider sense so much, leaving him feeling helpless in a way he hasn't done since he was just fourteen and his uncle had died because of his inaction, because of him.

He has no sense of time, cannot even begin to work out how long he’s been held captive or even how long he’s been unconscious for to say if whatever substance he was injected with has a long half-life or not.

Because of the aforementioned unknown substance whose remnants still pump through his veins, being metabolized and absorbed by different parts of his body and causing them to malfunction, he doesn’t hear the men who suddenly enter the room until they are right in front of him. He’s just suddenly aware of other people being in the room with him where one second before they were not there, and though his senses are still all over the place and too erratic, he thinks there might be five of them but he can’t be sure, he can’t make out their faces as they are all melding into one when he tries to look at them and focus.

One of the men steps forward to come and crouch in front of Peter whilst the others stay behind, though they remain close by clearly staying on guard. The one man then starts asking him questions, questions about how he found out about _Mariana Inc_., questions about who else knows and questions about Peter himself, among other things.

Peter has to work really hard to figure out what the man is even saying to him, the words being all muddled and echo-y as the volume oscillates between a quiet whisper and a bellowing shout that makes his pounding head go from bad to worse, and that’s on top of the man’s voice blending in with the other sounds of their surroundings—the heartbeats of everyone in the room, the buzz of the overhead lamp, the sound of distant traffic outside. It’s a miracle Peter is able to work out what the man is asking him, using the bits and pieces he picks up and context clues to guess at what the man is even saying.

“I gotta be honest with you man,” Peter starts to respond with a heavy groan, the effort it takes for him to use all the small muscles of his face to form words making his head pound even more, impossibly. “I can’t answer any of your questions because I barely even know who I am right now.” He doesn’t know how he does it, but he manages to follow his words with a wide, shit-eating grin at the man, just to be annoying.

His response causes the man to lose his temper and he starts to punch Peter repeatedly on the face.

Peter welcomes the sting of the man’s fists colliding with the bones of his face over and over, and over again, welcomes the crack of his nose breaking for the umpteenth time in his life from a particularly hard right hook the man throws at him. Oddly enough, Peter finds that the repeated impact of the man’s fists is helping with his blunted senses, sharpening them until the fog starts to lift and he can somewhat take in his surroundings.

Somewhere between the twenty-first and thirty-first punch, Peter takes in each of the _six_ men in the room with him who are all dressed in black with balaclavas covering their faces. He takes in the brightly-lit room he’s being held in which has work benches that have all sorts of instruments laid out all over them, for experimentation or torture, or both, he doesn’t know.

Peter starts to take stock of his own body after he’s taken in his surroundings; his throbbing head, the blood dripping down his nose, his quickly swelling face. However, before he can get further in his surveillance or grow more conscious and clear-headed, he finds himself being injected with another dose of the clearly specially-engineered tranquilizer and his eyelids start to feel heavy and his racing heart starts to slow as he slowly but surely loses his grip on consciousness.

He doesn’t have much strength left in him to fight anymore, so he allows the darkness to overcome him.

* * *

It’s more of the same from then on.

He wakes up whenever each dose of tranquilizer they give him wears off to a room filled with men in black who ask him the same questions over and over again. And each time Peter doesn’t answer them, somehow still finding it within him to sass them and offer them nothing but sarcastic quips despite barely being able to lift and contort his tongue to form words given how drugged up he is.

Each time he sasses the men they get angry and they employ different tactics to try to get him to talk—they beat him to a pulp, they break his bones individually, they waterboard him, they electrocute him, everything their depraved minds can think of. And each time Peter offers them nothing more than his snark, the only thing he manages to hold onto in the midst of it all.

Then once the men are done with him, frustrated at how little he gives them, they drug him again and leave him unconscious, ready to start all over again the next time he wakes up when the tranquilizer has run out.

Peter has no idea how long this goes on for, time telescoping in and out of his awareness, but the longer it goes on for, the more he starts to lose sense of himself. He has given them nothing but slowly but surely, they’re wearing him down.

Initially, Peter had tried to make the most of the brief periods of consciousness to take in his surroundings and try to either work out where he is or formulate a plan for getting out. But, somewhere between his tibia getting re-fractured on top of another badly healed fracture and the hundredth beating they gave him, he’d just…given up. He now welcomes, looks forward to even, the lull of unconsciousness brought on by the tranquilizer, the darkness it brings with it.

There’s a pattern to the torture, even if Peter doesn’t have the awareness and brain power to discern what that pattern is. His captors follow some sort of routine but eventually Peter gives up on paying attention to it or their presence, instead just focusing on enduring it until they leave him alone to sleep, to rest.

* * *

The next time Peter wakes up (his ninth time? tenth time?), he’s surprised when he isn’t met with the usual six to ten guys that usually come for him but instead finds just one, single man. He doesn’t know if they gave him a lower dose of the tranquilizer than they usually do, or if this man’s imposing presence just demands his full attention but Peter finds himself more lucid than he’s been the entire time he’s been here, less apathetically enduring whatever the men throw at him and more actually paying attention, keenly aware of the other presence in the room with him in a way he has not bothered to do since the first time he woke up in this room.

The man is huge, as tall as he is wide, bald and he wears a three piece all-white suit that’s immaculate without a single stain or crease to be found on it. Peter watches him with rapt attention as he carefully, slowly undoes his jacket and drapes it over the back of a chair then rolls up the sleeves of his shirt, in no particular rush.

When the man notices Peter is awake he bounds towards him then pauses to stare down at him. There’s something in his stare, in his imposing presence, that causes Peter to sit up minutely and something in him tells him this is _the_ guy.

“Peter Parker. 27 years old. Resident of Queens. Nephew of May Parker, née Reilly. Photographer at the Daily Bugle. Spider-Man,” the man rattles off each fact one by one in a calm manner that causes a chill to run down Peter’s spine.

The man apparently notices the fear that overcomes Peter, especially at the mention of his aunt, because he just grins at him, a wide and maniacal thing. Then, “The tactics my imbecile men have employed have clearly not worked, even with the tranquilizer OsCorp manufactured…”

Peter doesn’t hear the rest of his words, his mind hanging on to the mention of OsCorp. A brief flash of a memory flickers through his mind: the maniacal laughter of a man who’d long lost his mind, the mechanical sound of the glider, Peter rushing to catch her tumbling body, shooting out a web at the last minute which had caught on to her body then—

He’s brought back to the present nightmare when he realises the bald man is still talking to him. “We’re going to have a conversation, man to man, and you’re going to answer my questions.” He pauses and pulls up a chair to sit right in front of him before continuing, “Because if you don’t answer my questions, my men will pay a visit to your aunt, and to your friend Edward and his family. Would they last as long as you have with the drugging and torture, I wonder, hm.”

Peter tries to swallow down the fear that grips him in the moment, and fails.

“Mr Parker, I’m a man who values his privacy and discretion. So I’m wondering how it is that you found out about my business.”

There’s a part of Peter that protests, that wants to snark this man just as he’s done every man that’s come before him but the stillness of this man, the way he calmly threatened everyone Peter loves, tells Peter this is not a man he wants to mess around with. So he answers the man’s questions, “I found out through Romita.” But Peter can’t help himself, not entirely, “That guy’s a real slob, you should’ve never done business with him.”

The man clenches and unclenches his fist at Peter’s words. Then, “And who were you working with? Who else knows about me and my business?”

“No one. I work alone.” And it’s not a lie, not entirely.

He asks Peter a few more questions which Peter answers with half-truths, making sure to keep Michelle out of it and adding in some Parker-branded sarcasm here and there because he can’t help himself.

After a while Peter decides to try to find out more about this man and what he’s up to. Peter has been doing this for nearly two decades, plus or minus a five-year period where he was blipped out of existence, so he knows how much villains love to talk about themselves and their diabolical plans, monologuing to anyone who’ll listen whenever they think they have the upper hand. This bald man _does_ have the upper hand, so Peter decides to test his luck. “So, what’s the rush to build this device thing? Why do you wanna destroy New York so bad?”

Like magic, the man starts to monologue, just as Peter expected. Men, himself included, are all so predictable.

“My wife and son were killed because of a drunk-driver nearly six years to this day,” the man starts to explain, pausing to compose himself when he’s clearly overcome with emotion.

Something clicks into place in the recesses of Peter’s mind; Vanessa Mariana and the little boy Richard, the article saying they’d died at the scene of the accident. The pieces are falling together in his mind.

“From that day on, I realised this city has a deep rot down to its very core that needs to be weeded out and exterminated, _permanently_.”

A silence settles between them, as the weight of this man’s unhinged logic settles over Peter.

Peter doesn’t know what possesses him to say what he says next, clearly he’s a smart-mouthed glutton for punishment who doesn’t know when to quit. “Jesus, and I thought _I_ handled my grief badly. I can’t believe my aunt thinks I need therap—”

He doesn’t get the rest of his words out, an all-consuming rage overcoming the man in front of him to the point where he starts to beat Peter to a pulp.

He hits him repeatedly, over and over again and call it resilience or maybe madness, but all Peter finds he can do at that point is laugh. He laughs, laughs and laughs as the man beats the shit out of him, his already battered face likely swelling up and bruising impossibly more.

Eventually, once the man has exerted himself enough, he injects Peter with not one, but two syringes which immediately knock Peter out.

He welcomes the cloying darkness with open arms.

* * *

Peter doesn’t wake up, so much as he starts to see visions, still half-unconscious.

He sees a montage of images that are a mixture of real memories from his life and images he thinks his drugged up mind has conjured up. He sees his parents though their faces are blurred, his mind not quite able to concoct images of them from what little he remembers of them. He sees May and Ben on the day they took him in after his parents died, as scared and unsure as he had been but putting it all aside to comfort his younger, crying self. He sees his first kiss with Liz Allan in her basement before she’d pulled away and said something wasn't _right._ He sees a cold night spent on a fire escape, waiting until darkness gave way to sunrise.

The images play in sequence one after the other, in quick succession, all culminating with the image of _her_.

She’s sitting over him, straddling his lap and looking down at him with those kind, open eyes and that beautiful, blissed out smile. The image before him is so realistic he almost reaches out to touch her.

_“Aren’t you tired, Petey?”_

Her voice is a gentle whisper, like a breeze, that brushes at him and all Peter can do is nod because yes, he is so, s _o_ tired.

_“Come to me. Come be with me, Peter.”_

Peter surrenders, ready to give in to the pull of her, her warmth, her affection and her love which has been missing from his life since he lost her. There is nothing he wants more than to be with her once more; he has never wanted anything more in his short life.

He’s violently and abruptly knocked into slight consciousness when he hears the distant sounds of what he thinks might be an explosion, the ground beneath his feet vibrating with the reverberations of it. Peter starts to shake his head; no, no, no. This is not what he wants. He wants to go back, to be with her.

He wills the image of her back into his mind and there she is again. Her ever present smile on her face, all for him, as she looks down lovingly at him.

She moves to rest each of her hands on each of his cheeks then whispers out a breathy, _“Peter…”_

The image of her starts to fade at the edges as he regains his consciousness more and more, until she fades completely. Peter blinks back the remnants of her and finds Michelle stood over him instead, her hands resting on his face and calling his name over and over. “Peter? Peter? Wake up, please!”

Peter groans audibly as he becomes fully awake, swallowing down at the vague disappointment that it was all some drug-induced vision. He hears the way Michelle exhales audibly, clearly relieved that he is awake, that he is a _live_.

Michelle wastes no time in cutting through the restraints around his arms and legs, and she mutters something about how they don’t have much time as she does so.

She has just got him free and is helping him up and off the uncomfortable chair he’s been in so long he was beginning to meld with it, body stiffening and forming part of the wood that makes up the body of the chair, when the door flies open and is knocked off its hinges with the force it’s opened with.

The man from before, the large bald one, bursts into the room then pauses to look at the sight the pair of them must make.

He tilts his head and looks at Michelle in particular curiously. “And what are you supposed to be? Some kind of Felicia Hardy cosplay?”

Peter has no idea what that name means, but Michelle clearly does, stiffening beside him as soon as the name is out of the man’s mouth.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll get rid of you just like I did her,” the man continues taunting her with a leering grin, clearly delighted at the prospect.

Peter watches the switch Michelle undergoes within the blink of an eye, an almost feral rage overcoming her. She carelessly lets go of Peter and the only thing that stops him falling onto the ground in a graceless heap is the bench he manages to catch himself on.

Michelle lets out a loud sound, something between a scream and a ferocious roar as she starts to sprint across the room towards the bald man.

All Peter can do is watch her as she jumps up onto the bench, quickly grabbing a stray syringe still lying there likely from one of Peter’s torture sessions, before she launches herself directly at the man. She lands on his shoulders, quickly wrapping her thighs around his neck with little restraint until the man starts to suffocate, before she injects the syringe straight into his neck.

She quickly swivels around the man’s neck when he starts to fall backwards so she lands on top of him then when he’s down, she begins to punch him over and over again.

Peter can see the way the man’s face is turning purple and blue, blood splattering everywhere each time Michelle’s fist collides with his face. The man is knocked out cold, not even groaning each time he is hit and Peter realises with a start that Michelle intends to and will likely kill this man.

Finding the small sliver of strength that remains in him, he pushes himself off the table and limps towards Michelle and the man, calling out to her, “Michelle! Michelle! MJ!”

He imagines her rage has blinded and deafened her to anything happening in her surroundings, because she carries on beating the man.

Peter musters up all the strength and speed that remains within him, rushing towards her as fast as he can manage. “MJ stop! You’re gonna kill him!”

He eventually manages to reach her and places his hands on her shoulders and starts to pull her away from the man’s unconscious, bloodied body. “Please stop. You don’t want to do this.”

Peter can feel the way she practically vibrates beneath his hands, rage and vengeance thrumming through her so he feels it just beneath the surface of her skin. She opens her mouth, likely to protest and to tell him that he doesn’t know her or what it is she wants, which would be true, but they’re interrupted by the sound of the shouts and heavy footsteps of tens of men who are headed their way.

“We need to go, MJ,” he pleads with her.

She takes one last, lingering look at the unconscious man on the ground, sighs defeatedly then turns to wrap an arm around Peter’s waist to support his weight. The pair then hobble their way out of the room via the fire exit just as the legions of men who are after them on the other side burst through the door and start to fire rounds into the room.

They make their way through the sprawling hallways of the facility he was being held captive in, he still has no idea what or where it is, as an alarm blares constantly over them. There are bodies of men sprawled out over the floor as they walk through, men he presumes MJ knocked out and beat to get to him. Something in him swells at the thought of her coming for him, not abandoning him.

They keep walking until they reach an abandoned hallway which they walk to the end of, to where there is a window. Peter peeks out of it as MJ works to get it open and sees that they’re several floors up.

He doesn’t have his web shooters and he is too heavy for MJ to carry down so he has no idea what they're going to do.

Almost reading his mind, MJ turns to him, “Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” he answers without hesitation, unsure why.

“When I say, I need you to jump out of this window.”

Peter startles but nods his head anyway.

“Now,” she says without wasting time.

Peter leaps out of the window and sees her follow after him. They’re headed down towards the ground fast, at danger of becoming one with the cement when suddenly MJ shoots out something towards the ground which inflates and forms a large cushion that they land on just in time.

Peter’s heart is still hammering away in his chest at the close call, but he doesn’t have time to stew in his anxiety as MJ is helping him up almost immediately.

She leads him towards a motorcycle parked a few feet away from them, which she quickly mounts. Peter hesitates, watching her put on her helmet before she passes him one. “Get on, Peter,” she instructs, firm though not unkind.

He snaps out of it and rushes to get the helmet on before he climbs on to the bike, making sure he sits up properly and doesn’t lean too much of his weight on her.

As MJ revs the bike and they speed away, Peter is distantly aware of the sound of multiple explosions going off at once and he catches a glimpse of the building crumbling to pieces and he just knows it was MJ’s doing.

The exhaustion of the past however many days he’s been held captive starts to catch up to him, the adrenalin of the last hour rapidly wearing off and Peter finds himself slumping into his seat as he leans his head against MJ’s shoulder and wraps his arms tightly around her middle.

The last thing he’s aware of before he gives into the lull of sleep, is MJ’s hair being blown into his face by the wind and the sound of the bike’s engine as they drive off into the distance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey lol, I've already mentioned how this fic has kind of morphed into something I did not plan for/intend (and I've also added another chap to the total count but shhh, esp you, Seek). Thank you all for sticking w me and for your encouraging comments, I'm just leaning into wherever the story takes me now. Hope you enjoyed this latest chapter, as much as you can enjoy a chapter of Peter getting tortured um :/ lol. As always, kudos and comments are much appreciated!!!
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://tvfanatic97-2.tumblr.com/) and on [twitter](https://twitter.com/dayaspsychic) should you want x


	7. Down Among the Dead Men

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've finally reached the eventually in "eventual smut", folks.

The next stretch of days where Peter heals and purges what remains of all the drugs he was pumped full off from his body are tough, not as tough as being held captive and tortured by a maniac was, but tough all the same.

He drifts in and out of consciousness, in constant, immense pain as his body takes the time to mend itself; broken bones healing, skin re-stitching itself to close gaping wounds, and bruises and scars slowly fading away.

It’s a distressing process, especially when he has to go through it away from the comfort and technology of Dr Cho’s medical unit but Peter hasn’t stepped foot into the Avengers compound in well over a year. He told himself it was his anger that kept him away, anger at his former team mates who’d shown up too late on that fateful day, but really, what he actually feels is shame and the prickling feeling of inadequacy at how he’d failed to protect even his loved ones; how could he logically be expected to protect the entire country and planet dealing with Avengers-level threats when he couldn't even do the simple task of protecting those closest to him?

So, Peter is left to try and heal in the confines of his small bedroom in his shitty apartment. And the only thing that he holds onto to get him through the gruelling process is MJ; her soothing presence and calm, comforting voice, always there by his side each time he briefly rouses to consciousness.

Sometimes he thinks he hears other voices, senses another presence with MJ in the apartment but he dismisses it, zoning in on MJ and allowing the comfort her presence in particular brings to lull him back under.

Everything is a haze, a fog he has to wade through on the road to recovery, but the one thing that remains in his mind with startling clarity is just: MJ, MJ, _MJ_.

* * *

Peter wakes with a start, crashing back in the land of wakefulness with a sudden gasp. Part of him expects that he’ll find himself back in that harshly lit room, surrounded by men dressed in all black or worse, alone with the bald man in the white suit.

But when he blinks away the remnants of sleep, he finds himself back in his own bed, in his own apartment. He takes a moment to take in his surroundings as he wills his hammering heart to calm down- all the familiar furniture bought and assembled from Ikea with the intent of building a home for a family of two, the paint cans that still sit by the window, and the IV stand next to the bed that wasn’t there before, though there’s nothing hooked up to it.

Everything is bathed in the soft glow of the lamp on the nightstand, a direct contrast to the bright industrial lights of the facility he was held in and Peter feels glad to be in this cramped space in a way he has not felt in a long, long time.

He’s contemplating getting up, trying to muster up the strength to leave the cocoon of the comfortable bed when the door swings open and MJ walks in. She momentarily startles when she sees that he’s awake before immediately relaxing then walking around the bed to come to his side.

“How do you feel?” MJ asks, her volume low and tone soft as she starts to look over him meticulously and thoroughly, checking his wounds then removing the now useless dressing wrapped around his middle when she finds he’s mostly healed.

“Like shit,” Peter responds, huffing out a bemused laugh-like sound. His ribs no longer hurt at the mere action of laughing anymore, so that’s something.

She stops looking over every part of him then stands upright though she stays close to the bed, still by his side. “You’re mostly healed now, but Claire said you should probably take it easy for a couple more days.”

“Claire?”

“Claire's a friend,” MJ explains, a small smirk playing on her lips which gives away a secret history with this friend that he’s not privy to. After a moment she carries on, “You hungry?”

Peter’s stomach rumbles before he can answer her question, causing the pair of them to snort in amusement.

“I got takeout,” MJ says as she starts to walk around the bed and head out of the bedroom. She pauses and turns back to him when she notices him moving to get out of bed and follow after her, tutting disapprovingly at him as she gestures for him to stay put.

“I’m not an invalid.”

“Stop being ableist and get back into bed,” she says with a dismissive wave of the hand before she shuts the door behind her, leaving no room for argument.

Despite MJ instructing him not to, Peter gets out of bed anyway and pads across the room to the dresser. He pulls out a pair of sweatpants and the one clean t-shirt he has left, not having done laundry in a while. He puts the sweatpants on first, then is just in the process of pulling the t-shirt over his head when MJ walks back in to the room. He tugs his shirt over his head where it covers his eyes then looks up to face her, finding her watching him with her eyes narrowed and head tilted sideways, unimpressed.

Peter shrugs then takes the bag she’s holding out of her hands before he walks around her to go out to the living room. Once there, he places the bag on the coffee table before collapsing carelessly onto the old, rickety couch. MJ joins him not long after, perching on the opposite end.

They eat in silence, Peter mostly focused on getting as much food into himself as quickly as he can, not having realised just how hungry he’d been though his gaze occasionally flits to MJ.

Peter finishes first and for a while just watches MJ as she eats, taking in the sight of her in regular clothes with her platinum hair up in a messy bun. She looks remarkably ordinary, disguising the deadly woman he now knows her to be beneath the façade.

Feeling his gaze trained on her MJ swallows the remainder of her food down then turns to him, “What?”

He doesn’t respond for a beat, then, “Thank you, MJ.”

“It’s just cheap takeout, Peter.”

“I don’t mean for the food.” He looks into her eyes, holding her gaze, before continuing, “Thank you for, you know, coming to my rescue. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come and got me out of there.”

MJ scoffs. “What you did was really stupid,” her voice is still calm but Peter doesn’t miss the slight tremor in it, the anger beneath. She gathers up their leftovers and trash and gets up to head to the kitchen.

Peter is just about to tell her not to throw away what little leftovers remain when MJ speaks again, “Why didn’t you tell me what you’d discovered? Did you not think I’d want to know, considering I’m the one who brought this to you?” A pause. “This is _my_ fight, Peter! My fight.” Her tone this time is less calm, her frustration apparent as she forcefully throws the remains of their dinner into the trash can.

“And Ned is _my_ best friend. I’m just as in this as you are, MJ” Peter counters at her back.

MJ doesn’t respond, nor does she turn around to face him. She just keeps looking out of the small kitchen window.

Peter watches the slope of her back as it moves in time with her haggard breathing and Peter allows the charged silence between them to settle, turning the air between them thick with something unnameable.

“Who is Felicia Hardy?” Peter asks, cutting into the silence and deciding to throw caution to the wind by asking her the thing that's lingered at the back of his mind since she came to rescue him.

He doesn’t miss the way the muscles of MJ’s back tense in response to his question before she immediately relaxes, likely to hide her response and how meaningful the name clearly is to her from him.

When several beats pass in silence, he gives up and turns around to face the black screen of the television in front of him.

He doesn’t move or react when he hears MJ eventually move away from the kitchen and come to sit next to him on the couch in the same position as before. She doesn’t say anything so neither does he, at least for some time.

Eventually, in a quiet breathy whisper, “I lost someone too, you know. She was taken from me. Gwen…”

He doesn’t turn away from the dark screen as he speaks, but he hears the sound of the couch being rustled, MJ presumably turning to face him.

Peter snorts but there is no humour in it, none at all. “You know, I think that’s the first time I’ve even said her name since she— since I—” the remainder of his words die out, a choked sob escaping him instead. "My aunt would probably say something about me still being in the denial stage of grief."

He refuses to turn away from the blank television screen, refuses to face her as he admits to his failure so candidly, so is startled when he feels the weight of her hand settling on top of his own that’s clutching the couch cushion beneath it. All she does is rest her hand on top of his, a simple gesture, yet the outcome of it is anything but.

“My dad died in my freshman year of college,” MJ says eventually.

Peter turns to her, slightly confused by her words and their relevance, but offers his condolences nevertheless, “I’m sorry for your loss, MJ.”

MJ continues speaking. “My dad was...he was a complicated man. He worked with some bad people, some _really_ bad people that came after him when he stole something he shouldn’t have.” She doesn’t say anything for a beat, then turns to meet his gaze before saying the next part, “It’s why we had to leave suddenly in our junior year at Midtown.”

He lets out a silent gasp, thinking about the night he spent on her fire escape waiting for someone that wasn’t going to turn up. “Em—”

She interjects before he can say whatever he was going to say, he doesn’t even know what he was going to say himself. “They eventually found him when I was in college and well…” She doesn’t need to spell it out for him, Peter can put two and two together. “After he died I felt so powerless and I just wanted to—I just, I don’t know what I wanted, but I signed up for self-defence classes and Felicia was the instructor.”

Peter watches the way her posture relaxes minutely, a small smile dancing on her lips at the memory of the woman, whoever she is or _was_. “I'm guessing she wasn’t just a martial arts instructor?” Peter offers.

MJ lets out a chuckle, unexpected but humour-filled, and fond in way he doesn’t expect. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” A beat passes, then another, then, “She really helped me during a dark time in my life. She helped me feel strong when I felt weak, taught me how to be myself again and she just—” she stops and exhales audibly, shakily.

He diverts his gaze away from her to give her some semblance of privacy as she tries to compose herself.

“She used to moonlight as a cat burglar, too. Stealing from rich assholes and criminals. She fancied herself some kind of Robin Hood, the asshole,” MJ carries on, an amused lilt to her voice at the last part like it's some sort of inside joke.

Peter swallows down his comment about MJ being the same.

“But much like my dad, she stole something she shouldn’t have.” Her voice and body language shifts, turning more sombre all of a sudden.

“From the man from the other night?” Peter asks, unnecessarily considering the full picture of everything has already coalesced in his mind, everything starting to make sense finally.

“Yeah,” her voice comes out quiet and small, colored with grief. “She came to me saying she’d really done it this time, and she was in big trouble. I offered to help her but she said it was her mess and she was gonna clean it up herself.”

He can guess what happened next.

“That was the last time I saw her.” She pauses, swallows, then, “She just disappeared, and all I was left with was the name Romita to go off.”

He hears MJ sniff, turns to her and watches a tear run down her cheek and a lump forms around Peter’s own throat at the thought of what MJ has gone through; at least he has some answers in regards to what happened to his own love, hasn't had to contend with solving the mystery of what happened to her.

“I’m sorry, MJ,” he says, flipping his hand over so he can hold her hand in his.

The pair of them settle into a burdensome silence, the weight of both of their grief overwhelming them both.

Peter gives her hand a gentle squeeze then opens his mouth to speak. All he gets out is the first syllable of her name, an unsteady “Em—” before MJ’s lips collide with his in a searing kiss.

The kiss is rough, careless, and Peter gasps when MJ’s tongue grazes a path along his bottom lip, wordlessly asking a question he answers by opening his mouth to hers and tangling his tongue with hers.

He knows the kiss isn’t really a kiss, more a distraction from the stifling weight of their combined grief, but it’s a distraction Peter gladly, enthusiastically welcomes. The kiss deepens and Peter wraps his arms around MJ’s waist, hauling her body towards him so she settles on his lap with her legs straddling his own.

Their bodies start to move, both distractedly rocking into the other in time with the way their mouths mesh over each other.

Peter is undeterred when MJ pulls away, gasping for air, instead trailing his lips along the angle of her jaw and down to the column of her throat. He carries on along his path, moving down her neck, sucking kisses into the soft skin and allowing the gentle graze of his teeth to carry him along his designated path until MJ’s fingers tangle in his hair and tug at his head to reconnect their lips.

The next time their lips separate, Peter takes the opportunity to remove his t-shirt and he watches dazedly as MJ does the same thing, revealing her bared breasts beneath cotton.

He wastes no time in tipping his head forward, laving at the dusky skin. When MJ lets out a breathy sound that’s not quite a moan but is pleasure-filled all the same, he takes a pebbled nipple into his mouth, tongue circling it whilst he palms her other breast with his hand.

He tries to take his time, to pay careful attention to both her breasts but his exploration is cut short when MJ pulls his eager mouth away from her chest and gets up and off him. She pulls her jeans and underwear off together then drops to her knees between his legs.

Working quickly, she manages to pull both his sweatpants and boxers down in one and Peter finds himself instinctively lifting his ass off the couch to aid her in stripping him, his body moving almost at its own accord.

When the clothing that once covered his bottom half is fully off, leaving him completely bare just as she is, MJ settles in the space between his legs once more. She licks her hand and wraps a loose fist around him, her saliva and the bead of precum aiding her pull as she starts to pump her hand slowly, deliberately, causing him to grow harder.

Peter has to stop her when she dips her head and wraps her wet, hot mouth around his head, gently pushing her away before he signals for her to come and sit in his lap again. Once she’s sitting astride him again, he uses one hand to tilt her head down to connect their lips whilst his other hand travels down to draw small, determined circles over the bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs.

He tries to take his time with it, to make it good for her and get her ready with how he allows his fingers to wander down to her wet heat, teasing her with a single finger whilst his thumb takes over from where his fingers were working over her clit. He presses his tongue into her mouth as he presses two fingers inside her, curling his fingers just so in a way that causes her to moan lowly.

MJ lets him finger fuck her for a few moments, riding his fingers in earnest before she seems to grow impatient and lifts up away from his fingers. Instead, she wraps a hand around him, shuffles forward on her knees to line herself up then moves to tease his head through her slickness, a move which causes both of them to let out shaky moans.

She thankfully doesn’t tease him for much longer as she lines him up to her center then sinks down onto him, doing so at her own pace.

The warm, wet feeling of her around him has Peter panting before she has even taken all of him in and by the time he bottoms out, Peter can’t help but to exhale audibly, his breath hitching slightly in his chest.

That sigh transforms into a groan as she starts move, sinking down onto him fast and hard, rolling her hips before she lifts herself up slowly and the feeling of it is enough to render Peter almost paralytic.

MJ fucks the same way she fights, harnessing a certain control over her body and over his, too. She’s all grace and power and Peter is all too happy to be subdued by her, to surrender to her. He wants her to take everything she wants from him.

He watches the undulating arcs of her body as she moves above him intently, not daring to even blink. His eyes move from the column of her neck revealed when she throws her head back, a shuddering moan escaping her, down to the jiggle of her breasts which move in time with her movements, down to the clench of her taut abs, the power of the contractions aiding her movements before his eyes end their journey at the place where they’re joined. His eyes cross as he hypnotically watches himself disappear into her as she takes all of him with ease.

It’s overwhelming, the feeling of her wet heat and the way all his senses tune out anything outside of this apartment, outside of this moment. His world winnows down to the woman on top of him, to Michelle Jones, as he takes in everything about her with all his senses—the all encompassing smell of her which surrounds him, the melodic sound of her erratic breathing mixed in with her loud moans, the distant sting of her nails which dig crescent shaped indentations into his shoulders, the bead of sweat which he watches run down between her breasts.

She is on top of him and all around him. It’s overwhelming and Peter finds that he has to work really hard to calm his enhanced senses and stop himself coming too soon, not before her at least.

He sits up from where he’d fallen back against the couch cushions to hand over all control to MJ and moves his hands to rest over her ass, he grabs handfuls of her as he starts to help guide her movements over him, moving her up and down at a faster pace whilst he starts to thrust up into her at the same time.

MJ lets out a whimpering sound which Peter takes as encouragement to continue, bouncing her on him with increasing speed.

When she murmurs “I’m…close…” between thrusts, Peter moves one of his hands and presses his fingers against her clit, rubbing against her in a way that’s sloppy but determined, trying to help her topple to her finish.

MJ’s movements slow as she comes, one last loud, drawn-out moan escaping her. Peter moves his hand back to grip her so he can keep moving her up and down with the hands on her hips to help her ride out her orgasm until her feels his own orgasm start to wash over him, at which point he abruptly lifts her off him. He manages to pull out just as he comes, some of him spilling onto her thighs though most of it goes on him.

“Shit,” Peter pants out as he collapses back onto the couch whilst MJ does the same beside him, also breathing heavily.

The two of them stay like that for a stretch of time, sat on his couch as they try to catch their breaths and cool their overheated bodies.

Eventually Peter moves to grab his previously discarded t-shirt from the floor by his feet and uses it to clean himself before he passes it to MJ to do the same. She does so then gets up to head to the bathroom, leaving Peter alone in the quiet of the living room.

He stays there on the couch, sitting in silence for a while as he wills his racing mind to still. There are so many thoughts and feelings rattling around in his mind, all contradictory and at war with one another but he does his best to suppress them all, to ignore them all.

He’s in the process of doing that when MJ suddenly appears in front of him, crouching down to grab her own discarded clothes.

Before he can talk himself out of it he lifts his hand up to wrap gently around her wrist, grabbing her attention. “Stay,” he breathes out when she turns to look at him questioningly, his voice barely above a whisper. “Please.”

MJ doesn’t respond, just turns and starts to head to the bedroom. She pauses in her steps when she sees that he hasn’t followed her, though she still doesn’t say anything, and Peter hurriedly gets up off the couch to follow after her which is when she carries on towards the bedroom.

Once in the bedroom the pair wordlessly get into the bed underneath the sheets, Peter on his usual right side by the window whilst MJ takes the left side.

Something he can’t pinpoint or name constricts in his chest at the sight of her occupying that space but he tampers it down, instead focusing his attention on watching the woman in front of him.

She’d fallen asleep almost immediately after they climbed into bed which allows him to watch her unabashedly. The room is dark apart from the reds and blues of the billboard just outside whose light sneaks in through the gaps in the blinds, which allows his enhanced vision to see enough of her.

His eyes rove over her back, exposed from the sheet having slipped down her torso, and they leisurely travel across all the scars dotted all over her back. They serve as a reminder that the woman who lies before him is not the one he’d once known. She’s suffered unimaginable loss that has broken and re-moulded her into the woman who lies beside him now.

A fierce determination settles deep within Peter as he decides that he’s going to help her and do whatever it takes to get her the justice that she is owed and maybe, hopefully, some closure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pls practise safe sex- don't be like Peter and MJ.  
> Anywho, hope you enjoyed this latest chapter...hopefully I've provided answers to stuff in a way that makes sense? As always, comments and kudos are much appreciated!!!
> 
> You can find me [tumblr](https://tvfanatic97-2.tumblr.com/) and on [twitter](https://twitter.com/dayaspsychic), if you want x


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